I’m writing this on Saturday, so it is possible that Paul Krugman will finally write about Friday’s disastrous Jobs Report. But he wasn’t on top of it as other economists were — ones that still care about economics. No, his last column was about how horrible Trump is and ended with a potshot at Sanders supporters, “And if Democrats don’t rally the same way, he [Trump] just might make it to the White House.” And his blog posts have been almost nothing but attacks on Sanders and apologetics for Clinton. What about the economy, Krugman?

Paul Krugman knows that the single biggest determining factor in presidential elections is the economy. Clinton has a far greater threat in the form of our weak and declining economy than it does from Bernie Sanders supporters who say they won’t support Clinton in the general election. But where is Krugman on this issue? When I saw the Jobs Report, the first thing I thought was, “President Trump.” But I’m beginning to see Krugman like all those Labour Party leaders who would simply rather lose power than have it with Jeremy Corbyn. And that’s sad. I never would have thought that Paul Krugman could sink so low.

My primary concern about the Jobs Report is that it means the economy is weak and workers are going to continue to suffer either without jobs or with jobs that pay poorly. But my secondary concern is that the economy is heading downward and that this is a huge benefit to Donald Trump in the general election. Everyone should be concerned about this. What is the maximum that the “Bernie or Bust” could cost Hillary Clinton: a million votes? I think that’s even ridiculously high. But a bad economy could cost her ten million votes.

I’ve said all along that Trump is a bad candidate. He may even be so bad that with the economics strongly in his favor, he would lose. But his only path to victory is that the economy takes a nose dive. But is Paul Krugman worried about this? Apparently not. And he’s not alone. I see a lot of other liberals continuing on with the idea that the only threat to Hillary Clinton is petulant Sanders supporters. Saturday morning, Steve M wrote, What if Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Need Sanders Diehards? First, who ever said she did need Sanders diehards? Second, what if all the Sanders diehards wouldn’t be enough to save her because the economy is collapsing?

But at least Steve M has the advantage of never showing that he understands economics or its effect on politics. Paul Krugman used to know how important economics was to politics. He used to know that the economic trend was responsible for about half of the results of presidential elections. But now it is just “Bash Bernie Day” every day. And if ever there was a time to reach out to Sanders supporters it would be now. Because Hillary Clinton now has a far more formidable opponent than Donald Trump. Now she is up against a bad economy. The old Paul Krugman would have been interested in that fact.

You have to ask yourself: does the Federal Reserve still want to raise interest rates?

On Monday, we got a devastating jobs report. In May, the economy created only 38,000 jobs. That alone makes it the weakest month in just under six years. Now 38,000 jobs might sound okay, but the economy has to create roughly 150,000 jobs just to stay even because more people join the labor force than leave it. But worse than that, the Department of Labor revised the number of jobs created in the previous two months by 59,000. So we have a net loss of 21,000 jobs.

A Very Bad Quarter

If we look at the last three months now, the average monthly job gains has been 116,000. In other words, even if we just assume this is a blip, as Brad DeLong does, the economy is not even managing to tread water; it is sinking.

If you are a casual listener of economic news, the only thing you likely have heard is that the the unemployment rate went down from 5.0% to 4.7%. But this has nothing to do with people getting jobs, obviously. This is just the result of a sudden drop in labor force participation. More people have given up looking for work, so they aren’t counted as being unemployed, even though most of them do want jobs and have simply given up looking for one.

Fed Can’t Raise Interest Rates — for Now

The good news about all of this is that it makes it almost impossible for the Federal Reserve to get away with raising interest rates at its June meeting. And as The Wall Street Journal put it in a statement that drips with disappointment, it “complicates the possibility of a move at the July meeting.” But it isn’t just the Wall Street apologists who want interest rate increases; the Federal Reserve itself has been itching to raise them for the past several years.

The justification is always the same: the economy is improving and so in order to head off inflation, the Fed must raise interest rates. But this is pure hokum. The Fed wants to raise interest rates because it is good for the banking industry. And so it has looked for any excuse to do so. When they raised interest rates in December, there was no compelling reason to do it. The Fed claimed that the economy was going to grow faster in 2016 than it had the previous year. (The Fed has been making this same claim for the last several years.) As Dean Baker wrote at the time, “Job growth was likely to slow even without the Fed raising rates.” And six months later, we see he was (as usual) quite right.

But I’m not angry so much that the Federal Reserve is wrong time and time again. I’m angry that even now, the people at the Fed are disappointed not that the economy continues to struggle but that their handy justification for raising rates has been taken away from them. Just a week ago, The Guardian reported, Fed Chief Janet Yellen Says Interest Rates Will Rise “in Coming Months.” With the year almost half over, the Fed was set to raise interest rates two to three more times.

This is what Janet Yellen said two weeks ago:

Yes, most appropriate because I can guarantee you she has no friends who are struggling to find a job.

The only person on the Fed who seems to consistently make sense is Lael Brainard. And she was quick to grab onto the Jobs Reports and urge caution. But the question is whether it matters. After years of the inflation rate being below the Fed’s 2% target, most of the members of the Fed are not willing to let it go even up to 2% — much less above it.

The Fed Is Against You

As it is, the 2% inflation target is a number that Alan Greenspan pulled out of the air. And since he left the Fed, that 2% target has turned into a 2% ceiling. I find it aggravating that we are even talking about this. The truth is that all the ideas that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have for creating jobs mean nothing. And that is because the moment the the Federal Reserve sees the lives of working people improve, it will raise interest rates and put a stop to it. As it is, they want to do that without seeing the lives of working people improve.

The truth is that the Federal Reserve has far more power over you than the president or the Supreme Court or Congress or any other institution. And it is absolutely against your interests. We might as well just make the president of Bank of America the king and he can decide whether or not you can have a job and if you can, how much you can get paid. That’s what the Federal Reserve does.

California has a screwy system for our primaries. Instead of the parties getting to pick their candidates, everyone who is running is on the ballot and the top two candidates get to battle it out in the general election. The idea of these “top-two primaries” was to get more “moderate” candidates. But before getting to that, let’s discuss how it can totally disenfranchise the majority of the voters.

Imagine that you have a congressional district that is 60% Republican. And in the primary, there are 5 Republicans running and just 2 Democrats. Let’s suppose that they each get an equal share of their coalition. So each Republican gets one-fifth of 60%, or 12% of the total vote; each Democrat get one-half of 40%, or 20% of the total vote. So in the general election for a district that is overwhelmingly Republican, the voters get to choose from… two Democrats. That’s not Democracy; that’s madness.

Back in 2014, I wrote an article about the same issue, California’s Stupid Top-Two Primaries. In it, I talked about three districts where this was a real problem. Here is the most important:

But even in cases where the district is overwhelmingly Democratic and Republican, I still think it is wrong that partisans don’t get to vote for a candidate in their own party because of the top-two primaries. And that is looking like it is going to be the case at the state level when it comes to filling Barbara Boxer’s seat. According to Real Clear Politics, the top two candidates are Kamala Harris (30.2%) and Loretta Sánchez (17.4%). The best the Republicans have to offer is the devilishly handsome Tom Del Beccaro (7.0%).

Don’t get me wrong. As a partisan, I’m thrilled that not only is Barbara Boxer’s seat going to be filled with a Democrat but that it is going to be filled with a woman. I will probably vote for Sánchez, but I’ll be fine with Harris. (I have to admit, I haven’t been staying up on politics; this weekend will involve a whole lot of study.) So: go team!

But as a liberal, I hate this. In 2012, California was made up of 44% Democrats and 29% Republicans. And that comes out to about 60/40. I really do think that a Republican should be on the ballot for Senate in November. And a Libertarian and a Green and a Peace and Freedom.

There still remains the issue of getting more moderate candidates. Before I consider this, it shouldn’t surprise you to know that I think this is stupid. It’s like term limits. Everyone loves these kinds of laws (or in this case, change to the state constitution). It’s a way of telling other people how they ought to live their lives. I see no reason why Willie Brown should not still be in the California State Assembly if his voters wanted him there. And I see no reason why the Republicans shouldn’t be able to nominate whatever extremist they want.

But back in 2012, political scientists at UC Berkeley looked at the data and found that the top-two system did not give moderates any better a chance than the traditional system. So we have less choice. We have the situation where the minority party can win because of partisan disagreement. And we don’t even get the one thing we were supposed to get. California’s top-two primaries need to end.

On Sunday, while I was writing down my ideas of heroism for Memorial Day, Donald Trump was the only presidential candidate invited to talk at the Rolling Thunder Memorial Day rally in Washington. Rolling Thunder is a group that pushes for a full accounting of prisoners of war and those missing in action. There is more than a little conspiracy theory in the group. You used to hear it all the time: that there were thousands of Vietnam veterans who were still being held captive in Vietnam. It’s also kind of a biker thing.

Rolling Thunder’s big annual event is this Memorial Day rally, where they ride their bikes on a parade of sorts that ends at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The fact that Trump would speak at this even is ironic, if not funny. Jonathan Chait described it, Most Anti-POW Candidate in History Embraced by Pro-POW Rally. This is, after all, the man who dismissed John McCain’s heroism because he was captured. You would think that Rolling Thunder would hate Trump. But no.

Instead, they hate Hillary Clinton. One of the group members said that asking Hillary Clinton to show up would be like asking Jane Fonda to show up. Reason? They don’t need no stinking reason! But I think I can explain. Conservatives of the military ilk don’t care about soldiers or veterans or pretty much anything else you might think. They care about war. They care about beating their chests and claiming that they are the alpha dog. So Donald Trump is just perfect for them. The fact that he did everything he could to stay out of the Vietnam War doesn’t mean anything.

Conservatives Hate War Heroes

It all reminds me of the 2004 election. That was a very important election for me because it was the one when I really got involved in politics. Up until then, it had been very theoretical. I wanted such drastic things changed in society that I didn’t even pay attention to what was going on in the world. But in 2004, I was very much a Democrat — thanks in large part to President George W Bush who was really awful. But what I most remember from that campaign was the utter disgust I had about the swift boat attacks against John Kerry.

I don’t have any great love of the military; it is an unfortunate necessity. But I respect the men and women who do the job, even if I’m not willing to call them all heroes. What surprised me was that conservatives thought even less than I did about the military. Disagree all you want with John Kerry, but at least grant him that he served in the Vietnam War and acted heroically on at least two occasions. But no. The conservatives were eager to crap all over that for political gain.

Rolling Thunder Doesn’t Care About Soldiers

Conservatives care about war, not soldiers. Memorial Day is supposed to be about remembering soldiers who died in our country’s wars. But it’s the wars that conservatives are celebrating. The soldiers only matter in that you can’t have a war without them. Rolling Thunder should be ashamed to invite Donald Trump to speak to them. And they would be ashamed if they cared about the soldiers. But they don’t. They’re just keen for another war where Rolling Thunder can pompously ride their bikes and pretend care about soldiers. All they care about is chest thumping — like conservatives everywhere.

I listened to Hillary Clinton’s entire foreign policy speech. I wasn’t going to. I was just going to listen to a few minutes to get a feel for it, but it was so good that I got caught up in it. That was mostly because it was just a half hour long attack on Donald Trump. I’m far more interested in foreign affairs than most Americans, but that still allows me to be pretty disinterested in the subject. But listening to Clinton go point by point over Donald Trump’s ridiculous statements was great fun — except for the part about Israel.

Looking back on the last year, I have to say that I’m shocked that Donald Trump is the Republican presidential nominee. And I don’t say that in a political sense. I say it in a theatrical sense. If you’ve heard one Donald Trump speech, you’ve heard them all. I would have thought that the nation would have been bored by now. His answer to every problem is that he’s a great negotiator. Perhaps the best line in Hillary Clinton’s speech was, “He says he doesn’t have to listen to our generals or our admirals, our ambassadors and other high officials, because he has — quote — ‘a very good brain.'”

But as much as I enjoyed the speech and agreed with her on most things, I was especially bothered by one line about Israel, “They’re our closest ally in the region, and we have a moral obligation to defend them.” I understand: this is just divine knowledge in modern America: Israel is such a good friend of America. It’s just that I’ve found the claim harder and harder to take. In what way is Israel our closest ally? As far as I can tell, only by grabbing hold of us and refusing to let go.

It certainly isn’t the case that Israel is our closest ally in the region because of all the great stuff they do for us. It’s quite the other way around. And at this point, I have little doubt that Israel would become a loose cannon in the region if we didn’t hold them in check. I remember during the Persian Gulf War, there was a great deal of diplomacy that went on to keep Israel out of the war. And why was that? I mean, Israel is a country that probably depends upon its very existence to the unwavering support that the United States gives to it — both militarily and in the United Nations. But we have to worry about them messing up our own foreign policy.

I realize that Hillary Clinton had to give a shout-out to Israel. That’s the American way of politics. But it is just a convention. Israel hasn’t earned all the babying that we give it. And things are changing in the United States. I used to be a big supporter of Zionism, and now I’m really not sure if it isn’t just a racist construct that makes things worse. And certainly as the Israeli government has gotten more and more conservative, apparently determined to destroy any possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, it becomes a harder and harder country to support.

I figure we are at most 20 years away from US support for Israel being very, very contingent. Hillary Clinton isn’t wrong to say that Israel is our closest ally in the region. But as an American, it doesn’t mean much to me. And if I were an Israeli, I’d be terrified about it.

I came upon the website iSideWith yesterday. It’s been around since 2012 and it allows you to answer a bunch a questions and then see how well you agree with the different political parties and presidential candidates. Well, you know me: I love tests that tell me that I am who I think I am. So I answered the roughly 90 questions and got my results. And as should come as a shock to no one, I agreed most with Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party.

The test provides much more than that, however. It gets more interesting as you drill down. The people behind iSideWith clearly like this kind of stuff as much as I do, so they provide a lot of information. For example, they have a whole section of “polls.” These are basically just the results of particular questions on the iSideWith quiz. For me, this was the most depressing part of the whole thing.

iSideWith Polls

For example, 81% of the people who have taken the iSideWith test think that people should have to show photo ID to vote. Another 86% want term limits on Congress. And 73% think people on “welfare” should be drug tested. I picked these three issues because they are ones where facts really matter. There is no in-person voter fraud; term limits tend to make politics more corrupt; and people on “welfare” are less likely to do drugs than people who aren’t. (Also: why don’t we drug test the people on the mortgage interest deduction welfare program?)

After you take the iSideWith test, you can compare your positions with those of the candidates and the parties. I didn’t find that very useful because I know where the candidates stand. But I think this would be very helpful for people who don’t follow politics all that closely. And I think Bernie Sanders supporters could be helped a lot because they are likely to get results that are very similar to mine:

Now, I know: this is an imperfect way to determine who you ought to vote for. For one thing, iSideWith has me siding much more strongly with the Democratic Party than with the Socialist Party. I suspect that if we got into a serious discussion of capitalism, we would find that I was actually much more in line with the socialists. But the quiz does a good job of including those issues that are inside our Overton window. And in that context, I think the quiz is quite useful.

Bernie or Bust?

So it shows I most agree with Bernie Sanders. No surprise there. But I agree with Hillary Clinton almost as much as I do Sanders. And I agree with her as much as I do Jill Stein. And I wonder how many of my fellow Sanders supporters will actually vote for Stein over Clinton? People are wrong when they say a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump; it isn’t; it is a half vote for Trump. And I think that most Sanders supporters will come out something like me. The question is: with Clinton at 95% and Trump at 24%, is this really an election that you should sit out?

It’s funny. Even that 24% agreement with Trump is something of a myth. For example, on the question of whether labor unions help or hurt the economy, I said they help it. (I don’t think this is open to debate.) But according to iSideWith, Trump agrees with me, because Trump says labor unions, “Help, in theory but have recently become corrupt and should have their powers limited.” To me, that says he thinks they hurt the economy. They are already powerless and he wants to limit them even more?

Regardless, go over to iSideWith. You can take the quick test (Clinton was above Stein in that one, and Trump was only at 10%), or you can take the longer test by answering the optional questions. Let me know how you come out. If history is any guide, yours will look a lot like mine.

Afterword: Parties

Here is how I scored on parties:

1. Democratic: 96%
2. Green: 92%
3. Socialist: 86%
4. Libertarian: 51%
5. Constitution: 9%
6. Republican: 5%

Yesterday, I saw that Scott Lemieux wrote an article, Neoliberal Stooge Proves Democratic Party Needs to Be Blown Up. I didn’t finish reading it. Partly, that is just because I don’t think Lemieux does a very good job of sarcasm. But mostly, it was the line where he said that Obama was “proposing Social Security cuts attached to conditions Republicans would never accept.” Oh my! Grand Bargain apologetics again!

Then this morning, at New Republic, he wrote a similar article, Why Obama Turned Left on Social Security. It even uses the same words, “Tying ‘chained-CPI’ Social Security cuts to upper-class tax cuts no Republican Congress was ever going to pass was an indication that Obama was not actually trying to cut Social Security.” So Obama wasn’t for the Grand Bargain. He wanted to leave Social Security alone. But now he is in favor of increasing Social Security benefits because the party has moved to the left. Uh, not really.

But what really set me off was a follow-up article by Martin Longman, Obama Gamed the Grand Bargain Correctly. He wrote:

There’s another chestnut of Obama apologists everywhere. You see, Obama never fails; he is only failed by the political environment. Everyone knows that Obama was always for same sex marriage. It was just that he couldn’t come out in favor of it until it was politically safe because Obama is such a courageous political leader! And in this case, he had to act like the “adult in the room” with the Grand Bargain or else his friends in the mainstream media would have thought that he was just another politician with, you know, principles.

This was supposedly Obama’s cunning plan — or as Lemieux puts it, his “twenty-billion-dimensional-chess.” But what did he actually get? Did the media turn on the Republicans? Maybe I wan’t paying attention, but I didn’t see the media change its coverage in the least. It is always the same thing: there are the Democrats, there are the Republicans, and there is the truth, smack dab in the middle. As it is, the media is running to normalize Donald Trump. The truth is not something that the mainstream media uncover; it is something they define based upon where the two parties stand at any point. And Obama knows that.

What really bugs me is all this business of trying to find reasons why Obama’s policies are so much more conservative than liberals thought they ought to be. One of Obama’s more compelling personal traits is his honesty. When he said he was basically a Blue Dog Democrat, he wasn’t saying it to trick people; he was saying it because it was the truth. And when he pushed the Grand Bargain for years, it wasn’t because he knew that the Republicans wouldn’t take it. It was because he thought it would make him a bipartisan hero in the same way that welfare “reform” did for Bill Clinton.

Lemieux claims that Obama’s recent change is an indication that political change comes from the bottom up. Then why did Obama push for the Grand Bargain? There was no pressure for that — even among Republican voters. That’s why Lemieux and Longman have to make this ridiculous argument that Obama wasn’t really for the Grand Bargain. And had Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform” fallen through, they would say the same thing about that.

But there is extra pressure on Obama regarding Social Security — it comes from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. And good for her! But I give Obama no credit at all. When it comes to the Grand Bargain, Obama would have gladly sold us down the river in exchange for the cheers of the Thomas Friedman crowd.

Mark Thoma wrote an article that is inspiring in its bluntness, Tax Hikes on the Wealthy: Good or Bad for Growth? He goes through all the justifications for keeping taxes low on the wealthy and shows in his mild and careful way that they don’t add up. High taxes on the rich do not hurt economic growth.

Here are the myths:

• Increasing taxes on the wealthy will harm economic growth;
• Increasing taxes on the wealthy won’t solve the income inequality problem;
• Tax increases will blunt the incentive to invest in new businesses;
• The wealthy will move to other countries to avoid the tax increase;
• Increasing taxes on the wealthy won’t increase tax revenue;
• Less will be donated to private charities;
• The wealthy deserve what they earn;
• It’s a tax on small businesses.

You should read the whole article. Some of it is very funny. For example, all those charities that the rich give to? Mostly concert halls and universities. There’s very little that they give to help the actually needy. But here’s the kicker: the rich gave twice as much of their money to charity back when the top tax bracket was 70% than they were in the aughts when the top tax bracket was 35%. Funny that! Could it be that when people know they are going to be taxed a lot, they give more money to charity? Talk about rational expectations!

Problems with High and Low Taxes

There are few things I’m as certain of as this kind of basic economics. We just have so much data. It’s clear that having extremely high taxes is bad and having extremely low taxes is bad. Extremely high taxes will cause people to do things to avoid them and de-incentivize work. But we certainly haven’t seen that in my lifetime. What we have seen in my lifetime is the opposite. Taxes get too low and the wealthy have a much greater incentive to pay themselves more. And with greater wealth comes greater political power to get not just their taxes lower but to get other policies they want that are bad for society.

Based upon history, the top tax bracket should be around 70-75%. Of course, the idea of a top tax rate that high is so far outside the Overton window that people giggle about it when you bring it up. (Just like they did when you brought up Donald Trump as the Republican presidential nominee nine months ago.)

Economic Growth Isn’t the Issue

But what bothers me even more than this is that no one knows for sure. So I ask myself, “What if I’m wrong?” And my answer is that I don’t care. “Economic Growth” is a religion among policy elites. And you can see why. Traditionally, increases in productivity were broadly shared. But they aren’t anymore.

I’m always amused when people bring up the dot-com bubble and note that wages went up during it. Yeah, that’s true. That’s because we had a heterodox economist in charge of the Fed who let the unemployment get below 4%. So what these people are really saying is that if economic growth gets high enough, then the rest of us will get a taste. But the idea that 90% of us ought to get even 10% of the growth under normal times is just considered ridiculous.

Conservatives Don’t Care About Economic Growth

Now let’s look at the other side of the economic growth debate. Would conservatives be in favor of raising taxes if it meant that economic growth would increase? The answer is no. That’s because they don’t care about economic growth. They care about the tax rates that rich people pay. And this is a real problem because it means that conservatives are disingenuous. They aren’t for low taxes for the reasons they claim.

So I don’t care about economic growth — not in the current system where all the growth goes to the same people. In a sane political-economic system where economic growth was shared (even if it wasn’t completely fair), I would be for policies that would increase economic growth. But as it is, I don’t see any reason to be for them.

But in this country, it is so much worse because we’ve been told that the same conservative policies will increase economic growth. But they haven’t. Economic growth just gets lower and lower. But the policies have increased inequality, which I believe was the point all along.

I remember back in 2012, Chris Hayes got in a boatload of trouble when he tried to discuss Memorial Day. It was one of his greatest moments. He talked about the use of the world “hero” to describe soldiers who died in war. He said, “I feel uncomfortable with the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.”

There is really nothing controversial about what he said. He was, as is his nature, very careful. He wasn’t saying that soldiers weren’t heroes; he was just trying to explain why the word made him uncomfortable. The conservative blogosphere, of course, went after him big time. How dare he question that every army supply clerk wasn’t Hector and Achilles rolled into one?!

Of course, that wasn’t what Hayes was saying at all. But the controversy is entirely typical of the way that conservatives, and to a slightly smaller degree the nation, think about the military. It’s sad because it shows how facile their appreciation is. They don’t actually care about any individual “hero” but rather the very idea of the military. And in that way, the attacks on Chris Hayes make sense, because he was questioning war itself.

But there is another level on which this “every soldier is a hero” business bothers me. It’s very much like “every child is a beautiful snowflake.” If every soldier is a hero then none of them are. All we’ve done is to redefine “hero” to mean any person in the military — even if all they’ve done is spend 20 years doing paper work. (Note: I am not belittling paper work, which can be terrifying.)

What’s most amazing is that this impulse to turn every soldier into a hero (some of whom, remember, are psychopaths) is that it treats them as if they need protecting. They are like the children’s sports leagues where everyone gets a trophy. Now, I’m all for that! Children shouldn’t be turned into professional athletes for the fun of their children.

But it is exactly the conservatives who want 5-year-olds to be taught the importance of “winning” who also think that every soldier is a special snowflake who can’t ever be criticized. It’s ironic. Or it would be if it were about the soldier. But of course, it isn’t. It is rather about exactly what Hayes was just grazing in his comments four years ago: that “every soldier a hero” is really just a pretext for continuous war.

Meanwhile, for the vast majority of Americans, Memorial Day is really just about barbecues and watching sports on television. I can see why people might find my thoughts on the matter of war offensive. But they really are no more offensive than those who don’t treat soldiers as individuals but just rhetorical tokens. And ultimately, the problem (if you choose to see it that way) is that the people of this nation don’t care. For most people, Memorial Day is just another day off work (if they are lucky). For them, “soldier as hero” is the same as yellow ribbons: patriotism bought cheap.

Want to be angry about the mistreatment of the military? Don’t look to me! Look to the apathetic nation and the war mongers who want more dead “heroes.”

Achen and Bartels wrote an interesting article last week, Do Sanders Supporters Favor His Policies? It makes the point that political movements are not so much about ideals but about tribalism. It says that this is as true of the Clinton campaign as it is about the Sanders campaign. But it is also still as much of a hit job on Sanders as it can be while still seeming vaguely scholarly.

A good example of its bias is the contention that Sanders supporters are “disaffected white men.” It quoted a study that found that Sanders supporters were more pessimistic than Clinton supporters when it came to “opportunity in America today.” And they were less likely to think that concrete policy changes would improve things. I don’t really disagree with this, but it seems to me to be entirely the result of the youth and poverty of Sanders supporters. And certainly the quoted study did not control for these factors.

Paul Krugman was quick to jump on this article, The Truth About the Sanders Movement. (A title fitting of National Review!) Rather than summarize the article, he just quoted the most inflammatory section and then provided the Sanders ecosystem with “a short list based on my own encounters.” His own encounters! I’m sure he is basing this on all the food stamp recipients that he hangs out with. Or it could be just what he sees on Twitter. Either way, very illuminating!

He breaks Sanders supporters down into five groups. Not one of them includes me. What’s more, I think that not one of them includes 69% of Sanders supporters who say they will vote for Clinton in the general election (a larger percentage than Clinton supporters got in 2008). I think his list is actually the Sanders dead-enders or the “Bernie or Bust” types. They are:

1. Genuine idealists;
2. Romantics;
3. Purists;
4. Clinton Derangement Syndrome (CDS) folk;
5. Salon des Refuses

The Romantics are just hedonists who love being part of a political movement. You know the type: the women dance on the grass and the men join the drum circle. The Salon des Refuses are policy intellectuals who feel marginalized. But every group is demonized. Of the “Genuine idealists,” Krugman says they “are ready to dismiss practical arguments about why all their dreams can’t be accomplished in a day.”

In the past, I’ve been angry while writing these articles about Krugman’s biases. But I actually find this amusing. Krugman has gotten to the point where he’s just silly. And the truth is, he is right that there are these kinds of people who support Sanders. In particular, there is more CDS than I would like.

But you could, of course, go through and pathologize Clinton supporters in the same way. Who cares? What’s interesting is what Krugman’s article unwittingly shows: his skewed view of Sanders supporters. It’s all about the “Bernie or Bust” crowd. It doesn’t even occur to Krugman that his analysis totally ignores the vast majority of Sanders supporters.

But I can be generous. Krugman is, like many intense Clinton supporters, concerned that Sanders supporters won’t vote for Clinton. But he doesn’t seem to know that 69% have already said they will. I actually feel sorry for Krugman that his faith in Clinton is so tenuous that he can’t see reality. Of late, Sanders is the main thing that Krugman writes about. Of his six most recent posts, one is his Friday evening music, two are about what a great guy Krugman is, and the remaining three are Sanders hit jobs.

If things were reversed, Krugman would be the worst kind of “Clinton or Bust” idiot.

Given all this talk about PUMAs, I was interested to see that PUMA was an actual political action committee (PAC), People United Means Action. It was started by people in the “Party Unity, My Ass” movement. According to News.au.co, they said, “We are protesting the 2008 Presidential Election because we refuse to support a nominee who was selected by the leadership rather than elected by the voters.” That sounds suspiciously like what Sanders supporters are saying today.

In 2008, I was a John Edwards supporter. The reason was the same as the reason that I’m a Sanders supporter today: because they both got a woman they weren’t married to pregnant during the campaign. Oh, I’m kidding! People tend to forget that Edwards had a great platform. It bothered me that of the three major candidates, I wasn’t supporting the black guy or the woman. But to some extent, I think it is easier (or perhaps necessary) for minority candidates at the nation level to be more conservative.

Agnostic in 2008

Once Edwards dropped down, I didn’t particularly care. I thought that both Obama and Clinton were good. But while fatuous people claim that Clinton and Trump are the same, Clinton and Obama really were pretty much the same. It’s funny that I hear a lot of people say that what Democratic voters really want is a third Obama term. Well, that is what I think Hillary Clinton will bring. And I expect to be about as happy with her as president as I have been with Obama. And that’s why I fine with her but not excited.

It’s funny, however, when the “Party Unity, My Ass” folk decided to create a PAC, they went for the backronym People United Means Action. (For those who don’t know: a backronym is an acronym that is created after the fact.) I don’t mean to suggest that they should have gone with “Party Unity, My Ass.” That wouldn’t have been taken seriously. But “People United Means Action” was clearly picked so that insiders could titter to themselves about what it really meant. In fact, on the PUMA About page, they are even explicit about it, “You may know that there is another, more defiant meaning for the acronym PUMA and that many of us are motivated by a deep disgust with and distrust of the DNC leadership.”

“People United Means Action” Was Angry

I understand the disgust. Clinton did win the most votes in the 2008 primary. And when you look at pleged delegates, Clinton was really close. But as Clinton supporters will tell you today: you play the game with the rules as they are. Obama ran a brilliant campaign, and had the contest been to get the most total votes, it’s hardly clear that he wouldn’t have managed to get that too. At it is, the difference was just a bit more than a quarter million votes (out of over 35 million) and roughly three-quarters of a percentage point.

So the fact that Clinton supporters were angry is no surprise. But People United Means Action didn’t really do anything. In the end, the Democratic Party was united. And that’s what I expect this year. I’m completely with Greg Sargent, Stop Freaking out, Democrats. The Party Will Unify. Probably. He highlights a statistic that you’ve probably heard: 28% of Sanders supporters claim that they will not vote for Clinton in November, But at this point in the race in 2008, 35% of Clinton supporters said the same thing about Obama.

Now, as those in the “kids these days” caucus, like Jonathan Chait, claim that Sanders supporters say the whole system is corrupt. If you are talking about the economic system, that is a difference. But as we saw back in 2008, People United Means Action were making this same claim about the party itself. Even without Sanders’ help, I suspect the Democratic Party will be fine. But I expect that Sanders will end up being a strong advocate for Clinton, just as she was for Obama.