Ezra Klein noted last weekend, Donald Trump Is the Perfect “Moderate.” But you need to know what he means by “moderate.” He’s talking about how moderates are very often extremists on individual issues, which just cancel out to create a “moderate” voter. So let’s suppose that you are in favor of a $15 minimum wage and for ending all immigration. Well, the first belief would be marked as extremely liberal and the second belief would be marked as extremely conservative. Thus, such a person would be considered a “moderate.”

Klein noted that Trump has these exact same jumble of views, which make him a moderate. He might sound very conservative on immigration and foreign affairs. But there is another side to him:

This is all pretty standard stuff, and this is why I’ve been saying for a while that I would prefer to see Trump nominated. It isn’t, like with many liberals, that I think Trump would lose in the general election (although I think he would). It is rather that his opinions are far better than the rest of the Republican field. His conservative opinions are no worse than those of Jeb Bush or Scott Walker.

But I’m afraid that Klein is falling into the same trap that he is writing about. You can’t just throw all political beliefs into a single bucket. As I write about a lot, a populist in this country is an economic liberal and a social conservative. So it is ironic that the two major political parties are more conservative on economic issues than the vast majority of the voters.

So what can we say about Donald Trump? By the standard of American politics, he seems to be an economic liberal. And I would say that being anti-immigrant is part of that. It also goes along with his skepticism regarding free trade. The only place that he is clearly conservative is on foreign affairs. On social issues, he is kind of a mixture.

To a large extent, what liberals and conservatives get from their candidates is not policy. There are a few things they care about, but what they most care about is an attitude. For conservatives, that attitude is “strength.” And that is certainly what Trump appeals to.

What the other Republican presidential candidates have to offer are consistently repugnant ideas. All they offer that makes them more acceptable is that they aren’t willing to say things like, “Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers.” But the immigration policies that they favor are the same as those Trump favors. So just how are they more acceptable? It’s all about what can and cannot be said in polite company. And that’s meaningless. If Trump is unacceptable (and I think he is), then all the Republicans are unacceptable. But given that they say and do what all the other Republicans presidential candidates say, the mainstream press treats them like they are acceptable. It’s sad.

Paul Bibeau is one of today’s most brilliant satirists. Last week he wrote, What If They NEVER Come For Our Guns? I was going to use it for a quotations post, but there was nothing I felt I could cut, so you will just have to click over and read the whole thing. As you can probably guess from the title, it is written from the perspective of an Oath Keeper or other right wing Protector of Freedom™. But it’s a very special one who has started to have doubts. Certainly Obama is going to take away all the guns, but “the guy’s in year seven, and he’s really taking his damn time about it.”

For many years, I’ve been arguing that people who focus on conspiracy theories are missing what’s actually going on. There are the Jade Helm 15 types who have allowed their union jobs to be destroyed and their standards of living decline all while they worry about the coming marshal law. There are also plenty of liberal conspiracy theorists who do the same thing. But when you get down to it, all of the conspiracy theorists have a populist core that is upset that the power elite is rigging the system against them.

The rich have steadily warped the tax system so that they pay less and the rest of us pay more. But this is apparently too uninteresting to care about. And the rich have done a great job of limiting government programs that help the poorer classes. But again: not exciting. And the rich have managed to destroy unions while the middle class stands by and cheers. But who cares about such normal workings of society? It’s like documentaries about archaeological digs where we learn about the social structure of the Inca. Who cares about them when there are documentaries about how space aliens must have helped the Inca, because obviously they were too stupid to figure this stuff out.

Here is the core realization in Bibeau’s article:

If only we could get these people to think about this stuff. One thing that I continue to marvel at is that people have been saying this stuff for my entire lifetime. Yet their predictions continue to fail. They really are like people in cults whose faith only gets stronger as the prophecies crash and burn. But Bibeau really strikes at the heart of the central irony that these people who think they are fighting the power are actually doing its bidding.

Should Chuck Schumer’s position on the Iranian nuclear deal make us rethink his becoming the next leader of the Democrats in the Senate? After all, he isn’t doing what many pundits thought he would: just voting against it but not lobbying other Senators. He is instead actively lobbying other Senators. It’s a concern, because I am really worried about the deal. The thing is that the deal is a no-brainer. And the arguments make no sense. And as Josh Marshall pointed out last week, Schumer isn’t stupid. So why is he standing against the deal?

I’ve come to the conclusion that being against the deal has nothing whatsoever to do with the Iranian nuclear program. It is simple bigotry. The people against the deal just hate Iran and they are against this deal because it is good for Iran. It isn’t just that it helps the country economically. It also establishes it as a regular country. Over time, I’m sure the international reputation of Iran will be improved because of this deal. This is what those who are against the deal are actually against. They really don’t care about nuclear weapons. In fact, they probably think Iran having nuclear weapons will further isolate it.

To a large extent, this bigotry toward Iran is just a bank shot off Israel. The Israeli government wants to do everything it can to hurt Iran, and so many in the US follow along. I really do think that Israel is being shortsighted about this. This deal is good for Israel in the long term. Of course, it may not be good for the current Israeli regime. But who cares about that? And if Schumer had to admit to that — that his real concern is for Likud and not Israel — he would be laughed out of polite company.

This isn’t just about Schumer, of course. There is no sense in any argument against this deal if your actual concern is nuclear proliferation. So the real reason that people are against the deal is simply because they are against Iran. And look: I’m no fan of the current Iranian regime. But I am a friend of the Iranian people. And as we’ve seen over the last 50 years with Cuba, playing this kind of petty game doesn’t cause regimes to fall. It just makes the people’s lives worse without any up side — to anyone at all.

So I’m with Josh Marshall: I think Chuck Schumer should be disqualified for the job of the Democrat’s Senate leader. It’s certainly not because he disagrees with the president. I am very much in favor of that. We aren’t authoritarians like the Republicans. And it isn’t because I disagree with him. It is that his argument makes no sense on its own terms. And the only way to explain that is to see that — just like every single Republican in Congress — he’s just a hate monger who can’t see past his own rage and support a deal that ultimately is in everyone’s best interest. Yes, let’s dump Schumer.

I have long felt in an odd place politically. I am a liberal — even a socialist, although I think the word doesn’t mean much in an American political context. Yet I consider myself deeply conservative in a personal way. I’m not keen on change. I do value (good) tradition. What I’m not is hateful and exclusionary. And when I look backwards, it is not to see some static past, but rather to see the process. I am very interested in taking what has worked in the past and using it today. But I’m not at all interested in fetishizing the past.

But that is one thing about my conservatism: I think the whole process of not seeing the past correctly dishonors it. Here in America, there is far too much facile patriotism. People are patriotic in the same way that football fans cheer for the home team. Listening to most people talk about the country, the furthest they will go is to admit that “mistakes were made” in the past. They are of the mentality of, “My country, right or wrong.” But if you look at the actual Carl Schurz quote, it is, “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” That seems to me to be the most basic kind of conservatism.

Corey Robin wrote a very interesting article about this question earlier this month, We Have the Left and Right All Wrong. Let me note that of course conservatives don’t look back. I’ve written about this a lot in the past: conservative thinkers only have a shelf life of about a generation, because after that, the vileness of their thinking becomes clear. As Robin noted, “In Burke’s case, it was aristocrats over commoners; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it would be masters over slaves, employers over employees, husbands and men over women and wives.”

One question that a lot of us liberals ask is why it is that workers rebelled against the power elite a century and more ago, but that they are largely complacent now. Robin claims it is because workers then had a memory of the way that life was before industrialization. Here’s a shocking bit of data: in 1820, 80% of all workers were self-employed; 120 years later, 80% worked for someone else. And nothing has changed since then. Don’t think that the people working for Uber are really self-employed. They are just employees by another name. Regardless, before industrialization, workers had more control of their lives. Remembering that was critical to liberal organizing at the end of the 19th century.

The greatest success that the power elite have had is in making everyone think that the current economic system we have is the only one possible. And this is how we get the New Democrats and neoliberalism. It is based on the idea that we can only tinker with the existing system. It’s a very dangerous mentality. If you truly think there is no other system, you don’t work on other systems. And you are stuck. As Robin wrote, “Capitalism rests upon repeated acts of forgetting; a robust anti-capitalism asks us to remember.”

When modern conservatives think about the past, it isn’t history or even memory — it is nostalgia. We see this in the Republican presidential debates. There is a constant hearkening back to when America was “strong” and “respected” and above all “authentic.” All of these ideas mean everything and thus nothing. They ultimately work to the benefit of an eternal now. Liberals are the ones who see the past and mine it for what was good and try to develop a better future. We are the ones who value history — we are the true conservatives.