It is looking more and more like Jeremy Corbyn will be elected to head the UK Labour Party. I’ve written about it before in the the context of the screwed up UK media. But the truth is that the media are screwed up only because the Labour Party leadership is so screwed up. Let me explain.

Corbyn is an old fashioned leftist — you know, the kind who actually stands for leftist values. He has never had much power in the party. And the way the Labour Party elects leaders, he normally wouldn’t even be in the running. In order to be on the ballot, a candidate must be nominated by 35 MPs. Well, Corbyn did not get that. But at the last minute, a number of MPs changed their votes, because they wanted him in the election to have a wide variety of opinions.

These same MPs were not planning to support Corbyn in the election. And here is the key thing: they never dreamed that Corbyn would actually win. Now we are seeing lot of coverage claiming that the Labour Party membership has moved to the left. But this is poppycock. What really happened is exactly what’s happened in the Democratic Party: the voters have stayed where they were while the party establishment have gotten more and more conservative.

It’s interesting to compare this to the Republican Party. In that case, the base of the party has gotten more conservative while the party establishment has tried (futilely) to hold it’s already extremely conservative ground. I only mention this so that no one mistakes what’s going on with the two liberal parties with what continues to happen with the Republicans. It isn’t the same — at all.

I suspect that the Labour Party voters were happy enough with the establishment as long as it won elections. But if not, what is the point? “Not as bad as the Tories” really isn’t much of a rallying cry. And let’s be honest, that’s all that Labour has offer these ten years or so. But I don’t expect to the Labour Party establishment to accept this. As it is, they are now talking about how Corbyn’s support is the result of Tories sneaking into the party to destroy it. The establishment just doesn’t get it.

It’s even worse than this. Simon Wren-Lewis has reported that many of the top people in the Labour Party have refused to serve under Corbyn if he is elected. But that’s nonsense. “If, following a Corbyn win, the party united around him in exchange for Corbyn parking some of his less popular policy positions, Labour could once again become an effective opposition. If instead his leadership is accompanied by constant public division within the party, there is a danger that this will overshadow everything else.” But I suspect there will just be more infighting, because what the party has become is too divorced from what its voters actually believe in.

Of course, it is far worse in the United States. At least there, the parties aren’t crazy. Here, we have hugely popular ideas — like raising the minimum wage — that are only starting to get traction in one party and are completely off the table in the other. But the whole thing makes me wonder about democracy in the world. Does the will of the people matter anymore? Or will the political parties always gather around the desires of the power elite? I’m afraid it is the latter.

For many years, I’ve been arguing that the New Democrats’ idea of pushing the Democratic Party to the right is the actual cause of the Republican Party going completely insane. It’s very simple. The Democratic Party’s push right makes the Republican “tent” smaller. They have no choice but to bunch up in a smaller and smaller group on the far edge of conservative ideology. But this has very broad applicability. Since the mainstream news is all about defining acceptable discourse as whatever is between the Democrats and the Republicans, reality itself is distorted.

We’ve been seeing this with the recent Planned Parenthood hatchet job, where there is no scandal, but still the press has treated it as though it were news. And we’ve seen this regarding Benghazi, the IRS non-scandal, and “Fast and Furious.” But most of all, we’ve seen it in the courts with Obamacare. First there was National Federation of Independent Business v Sebelius. That was a case that most legal experts thought was a joke. It was just something that allowed hate radio hosts to use ridiculous slippery slope arguments, “Could the government force you to eat broccoli?” And then, the broccoli question was asked by Scalia at oral arguments. Unbelievable.

And then more recently, we had King v Burwell, again a joke of a case — but one where the minority found that their previous positions on laws having to be read in their totality didn’t matter. If there was a single phrase that allowed them to destroy a law they didn’t like, they would do it. This is not ultimately about the courts, however. This is about a political system that has gone off the rails, because it depends upon a two party system with each side being reasonable. We now have a system with a conservative party and a proto-fascist party. It’s no wonder that things are so screwed up.

We have a little good news, however. Ian Millhiser wrote, Conservative Federal Judges Wave the White Flag on Obamacare. This doesn’t come as a shock. When the King decision came down, a lot of people commented that Chief Justice Roberts was sending a message that he wanted all these stupid lawsuits to stop. As it was, there were hundreds of them. It was like shooting randomly at a target — some arrows would hit the target by chance. And as we saw, the two anti-Obamacare cases that got traction really were ridiculous.

The newest case in this is Sissel v Department of Health and Human Services. It is a technical challenge to Obamacare, which claimed that the law was invalid because it violated the Origination Clause that says that bills to raise revenue must originate in the House of Representatives. But that doesn’t stop the Senate from taking any House bill and totally rewriting it, which is what it did in this case — just as it has done many other times like in 1986, when it did this to push through a Reagan tax cut. The entire DC Circuit Court said no to this challenge. And that included very conservative justices, including one who said yes to King (actually, it was Halbig at that time — same case).

It seems that John Roberts’ message has been received by the conservatives in the federal court system: no more! The conservatives have had their chances to manipulate the judicial system to destroy Obamacare in a way they haven’t been able to do legislatively. They’ve failed. It is time to get on with other things. And I still think that in another ten (maybe even five) years, even the vast majority of Republicans will see it as untouchable. I expect to start seeing conservative articles with titles like “Actually: Obamacare Is a Conservative Law” and “Is Obamacare Really the Free Market Healthcare Choice?” And then the Republican Party can get on to the serious business of rewriting history about how they were always for Obamacare. Maybe they will start calling it Boehnercare.

Paul Bibeau wrote a great short article, Liberals, Not Libertarians, Are The Ones Helping Us Avoid Getting Incinerated. It’s an issue that I’ve thought a lot about over the years. His focus was on Rand Paul. He noted, “He talks a good game, but when the Iran deal comes up for a vote, he’ll oppose it like any other Republican.” That’s right. Rand Paul is always in favor of libertarian policy in the abstract. He’s all against the idea of Guantanamo Bay, but against any actual policy that would close it. He’s against government surveillance, but when there is actual law to fight it, he’s against it. And he’s against foreign wars in the abstract, but is just as belligerent as the rest of the Republican field.

Bibeau makes a glancing blow to the common libertarian complaint that Paul isn’t a “true” libertarian, calling him “Libertarianesque.” But when exactly have we seen a “true” libertarian anywhere outside a Libertarian Party meetup? The “true” modifier is just a way for a very insular group to claim that its philosophy is only ever failed, it never fails. If libertarianism was anything like its proponents claim, then there would be an equal mixture of libertarians in the Republican and Democratic parties. But there aren’t.

My own experience in the Libertarian Party was that the vast majority of people were just disenchanted Republicans. In fact, there were almost no libertarians who came from the left. The ones who did were all there because they wanted drugs legalized. I was one of them. And it was telling seeing people in the party deal with the issue. They were clearly in favor of certain ideas: taxes are slavery; property rights are inviolable; the poor are losers; unions are terrible. And if the subject came up, they would grit their teeth, sigh, and admit, “Yes, our philosophy also says you should be able to have drugs.”

My issues were not just drugs. I cared deeply about civil rights and a humble foreign policy. But whenever any libertarian got traction, it was not because of issues like that. On the left, much was made of Rand Paul’s reluctance to say that he would support the Voting Rights Act. But the truth of the matter is that this position probably made Paul more popular, not less. Libertarianism owes most of its support in this country to neo-Confederacy. Many libertarians may not mean to imply oppression of minorities when they talk about “states’ rights,” but it is still a racist dog whistle.

My real break with libertarianism came when I saw that there was actual movement on drug laws: they were getting less harsh and cannabis was on its way to becoming legal. This certainly wasn’t due the Republicans. And the arguments being made were practical, so the changes weren’t even coming out of the intellectual framework of libertarianism. It was good old-fashioned liberalism that was improving the world. The high minded rhetoric of the Libertarian Party was fine, but it wasn’t moving society in a positive direction.

It was worse than that. By the time of my change, I had already noticed a problem with libertarianism: “Vote for libertarian rhetoric; get conservative policy.” This is something that immigrants especially fall for. They hear the Republicans talk about “freedom” and “small government.” So they vote for them. But somehow, they rarely manage to ever get past the rhetoric to seeing what the Republicans actually do. I don’t doubt that Rand Paul would be better on foreign policy than, say, Jeb Bush. But would he be better than Hillary Clinton? Almost certainly not.

I’m the first to admit that the Democratic Party is imperfect. But if a would-be libertarian is actually interested in better drug laws and less war, she should turn away from the Libertarian and Republican parties and accept that the Democratic Party is the best game in town.