I’m a big fan of Brian Beutler. And I agree with his conclusion in his recent article, The Trump Crack-Up Is Just the Beginning of the Republican Civil War. His point is that even if Trump loses the general election badly, the Republican Party won’t change. But he pushed one of the most common and ignorant claims about the Democratic Party, and more generally political science.

According to Beutler, after the three presidential losses (1980, 1984, and 1988), the Democratic Party reassessed itself and decided that it had to move to the right. Thus brought Bill Clinton and victory. That’s a nice narrative. But it’s totally wrong. Carter wasn’t a liberal. He was the beginning of the emergence of what would become the New Democrats. What’s more, he was — as were Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis after him — part of that new breed of Democrats who weren’t really ideological but just technocratic.

We look back on them now as liberal, not because of their policies, but because they lost. Remember, I was around during Bill Clinton’s term. And according to the conservative movement, he wasn’t just liberal, he was a radical — a communist, even. That’s because Democrats are always leftist radicals in the minds of conservatives. And this is why it makes no sense to try to take welfare “off the table.” Did Bill Clinton ending welfare as we know it make the Democratic Party any less prone to attacks that it was the party of welfare recipients? Of course not!

But as I’ve shown elsewhere, and as is documented with scientific precision in Lynn Vavreck’s book, The Message Matters, the economic fundamentals favored the Republicans in 1980, 1984, and 1988. It would have been very surprising if the Democrats had won any of those races, because the fundamentals were not only against them, they were against them forcefully. Carter eked out a slight victory in 1976 because the fundamentals were only against him slightly.

Neither the nation nor the Democratic Party base was begging for the Democratic Party to move to the right in 1992. Bill Clinton was not the answer to the previous three elections. He was, however, a gifted politician in a party that had mostly been taken over by conservative elites. The only thing the party was responding to was the desires of powerful people in or aligned with the DLC.

I find this stuff really annoying because it just isn’t hard. My job — what people are willing to pay me for — is technology writing. If you want me to make Fortran 77 interesting and understandable, I’m your man. I have a basic understanding of computer science and programming. But political writers generally don’t know anything about political science. And it is particularly sad in the case of Brian Beutler, because he’s both smart and insightful. But how about learning a little about the science of it? Instead, it is just fine to depend upon what everyone “knows” — which turns out to be untrue.

So yes, the Republican Party won’t change even if Trump only manages to get 30% of the vote. But the Democratic Party is no different. What’s more, why is the presidency such a big deal? Does political science teach us that the presidency is all that matters? No, of course not. And as it is, 31 state legislatures are controlled by Republicans, compared to just 11 by Democrats! They also control the Senate and the House. And after the next election, they will almost certainly still control the House — and might control the Senate. It seems to me that the Republican Party is doing okay.

This all disturbs me. But we aren’t going to change it unless we can see the truth and look clearly at the political science. And believing that Bill Clinton was a response to political changes in the country is perhaps the biggest part of the problem. Because now conservatives win even when the Republican Party loses. And someone as smart as Brian Beutler should understand that.

I noticed a couple of weeks ago that I had totally stopped watching The Daily Show. So I went back and watched a week of it. It’s still quite a funny show. But it is nothing you won’t see on countless other late night talk shows. There is nothing insightful about it. And I say this as one who had my problems with the show under Jon Stewart. I agree with Emmett Rensin in The Smug Style in American Liberalism. There was always a problem with it trying to be non-ideological and thinking that policy fights were really just a question of everyone accepting what the facts are.

But the new show with Trevor Noah is just an exercise is triviality. I have to question the idea of giving the show to a recent immigrant, given the tendency to see one’s new locale as charming and benign. And the United States is really not either of those things. Or at least not things that make for good social satire. Another problem may be his age. Certainly, John Oliver seems to be more in the tradition of Jon Stewart, and he is both older and less of a newcomer to the nation.

Oliver definitely is continuing the smug style of liberalism. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As I’ve noted in the past, when Jon Stewart hosted The Daily Show, I may have had problems with it but I watched it every day. And John Oliver’s long segments on Last Week Tonight are incredible. His most recent was an excellent example, but also telling because it isn’t about politics at all. It’s about scientific studies and the terrible job that the media does in discussing them. Check it out:

This is an old problem in statistics. If you do the same study enough times, you will occasionally get a study that finds something that is incorrect. This is something that drives me crazy about the way polls are presented. I often hear things like, “Candidate A and B are in a statistical tie.” This is because the two candidates are closer than the margin of error. But this is meaningless. The margin of error is just a measure of how many people were sampled. No one poll is very meaningful, although it might by chance be correct.

The reason that the smug style of liberalism is really not a problem to me is because our society is so out of kilter that just getting the facts right is a big deal. It reminds me of what I said about Paul Krugman years ago: he’s a lot more conservative than I am and I look forward to the day that I start disagreeing with him. That day is at hand, of course. Just check out his recent blog post, The Facts Have A Well-Known Center-Left Bias — a clear case of false equivalence.

But it is sad to see The Daily Show sink even below the smug style. It isn’t helped by the fact that Noah now has Donald Trump to slam night after night. It does make me wonder what will happen once Donald Trump goes away and Noah doesn’t have permission to go after so much else that is just as dangerous, but perhaps not as obviously so.

It’s sad to say, but I miss Jon Stewart’s smug style of non-ideological liberalism. I can’t imagine a day in my lifetime that we won’t need it.

Political scientists Boris Heersink and Jeffery Jenkins wrote what I think is an incredibly insightful article over at The Monkey Cage, GOP Voters Picked Trump. Party Leaders Aren’t Falling in Line. Here’s Why That’s Surprising. The basis of the article is what politicians gain by joining a political party and what they give up.

They note that there has been a great deal of research done on what being in a political party provides. The biggest thing is that parties help individual politicians win — elections as well as battles over law making. They also note that relatively little research has been done on what they give up in joining a political party. That may be because it’s kind of obvious: they give up their independence.

Give a Little and Get a Little

Now I understand, none of this is shocking. Everyone has been a member of a group. And you know that you give a little and you get a little. This is, by the way, why I’m against the Bernie or Bust movement. While it’s true that Hillary isn’t my perfect candidate, neither is Bernie. If I wanted perfection, I would write in myself for every elected office in every election ever.

The problem that Heersink and Jenkins highlight is that Donald Trump hasn’t given anything to the party. He is entirely himself without making any compromises to the party. Thus, why should the party offer him all the good things that come with being in the party when he hasn’t and likely won’t reciprocate. I’m very much with John Dean: Donald Trump is a classic authoritarian leader. He’s also a narcissist. It’s all about him. I’m sure that a 1% chance of his becoming president more than offsets a 99% chance that he will destroy the political party he is nominally attached to.

Cruz Is Even More Disloyal to His Political Party

But what goes unmentioned in the article is Ted Cruz. And I think he is an even better example of this. That’s because Trump has used the Republican presidential nomination for his own purposes, but he hasn’t really used the party otherwise. He might have been able to do this well as an independent. Ted Cruz on the other hand, has used the Republican Party to win at the state level and then at the national level. But he has been the very definition of disloyal. He’s been one of the Democrats’ most potent weapons since he entered the Senate.

The conclusion of the Heersink and Jenkins article is that by Republican elites not going along with what their voters clearly want, “The result could be a complete fracturing of the party.” But I think that the fracture appeared a long time ago when candidates like Ted Cruz started getting elected. If you look at the primary so far, over 70% of all Republican votes have been for Cruz or Trump — candidates who take and do not give to the party. The base doesn’t care about the party. The base has been trained by the party itself to think that the base should get everything it wants and should never have to compromise about anything.

And I can’t blame them. Since at least Bill Clinton, the Republicans have not argued that the Democrats, as a political party, are wrong about policy, but that they are foreign interlopers bent on destroying the nation. The Republican Party is already fractured. The question is whether it will be destroyed.

Economist JP Koning wrote a fascinating article last week, What Makes Medieval Money Different From Modern Money? The quick answer: medieval money didn’t have its value printed on it. So, for example, a testoon wasn’t worth any set amount. So if you wanted to buy something that cost a pound, you wouldn’t automatically know how many testoons would be required to pay off that debt. The value of the testoon would be set by royal decree. So if the testoon was decreed to be worth one-twentieth of a pound, you would need 20 of the little buggers to buy the product. Now what has this got to do with monetary policy.

Think back on the 2008 financial crisis. That was just the most obvious sign of the bursting of an $8 trillion housing bubble. And it was that burst bubble that caused the recession. People all over the country woke up one day to find that they actually had a lot less money than they thought they had. Or more often, they learned that they were in a lot more debt than they had thought. That would have been a great time for some inflation. Instead, we got a short period of deflation and then very low inflation for the next 7 years.

The Federal Reserve has had a hard time keeping inflation even at its low 2% target. But what if the Fed could have just dictated inflation? Think of our example above. If the kingdom found itself in recession, the king could proclaim that there were now only 19 testoons in a pound. People aren’t idiots, of course. They would realize that a pound was only worth 95% of what it used to be. So they would raise their prices (products and labor) by roughly 5%. Ta da! It’s like a magic trick: instant inflation.

But now, without doing anything at all, you have helped out the debtors. They would owe fewer testoons than they had before the new decree. This would allow them to deleverage more quickly and get the economy going that much faster. Given that lenders are generally rich, we aren’t worried that modest inflation would reduce their consumption. The king could also use this system to fight inflation by increasing the number of testoons in a pound to 20 or even 21.

Obviously, this is a gross generalization. Koning’s point is that the medieval monetary system was more flexible than one might have thought. But I take away something more sobering. If the Fed had the ability to do this, it might have used it in very minor ways to help out after the 2008 crash. But it wouldn’t have done so aggressively. The Fed chair at that time, Ben Bernanke, has been very clear that he think he and the Fed did a great job.

The problem with the Federal Reserve hasn’t really been a lack of tools, but rather a philosophy that hurting the rich even the smallest amount (a 5% inflation rate would be considered outrageous by those now in power) is unacceptable. I don’t know how much the kings of old used such monetary tools to make life better for the people. I doubt it was used much and for the same reason that our monetary policy is to have a 2% level of inflation: because those in power don’t actually care about the vast majority of the people.

The thing about free trade is that it makes markets more efficient. One country doesn’t have to depend upon itself for all of the things that it needs. This lowers costs all around and makes the world richer. In theory, I’m all for free trade. In practice, I’m against it. This is because as trade barriers have been taken down over the last four decades, the economic gains have not been shared; they have gone overwhelmingly to the already rich. This is what happened with NAFTA in the US: it did increase profits, but it didn’t help the American worker. But we hear a lot that it was at least good for Mexico.

There is a certain strain of liberalism that likes this idea very much. From their vantage point, the poor here in the US may have it bad, but they should shut up because the poor in Zimbabwe have it even worse. I discussed this in an article last year, Data Journalists Don’t Know Anything About the Poor Anywhere. The problem is that these journalists are usually in the top quintile of income in this country and so the poor everywhere are abstractions to them. So they are the kind of people who would argue that damage done to US workers would be acceptable for the sake of the even more poor people in Mexico.

Part of the problem here is that this whole globalization game isn’t much different in other countries than it is here. The greater trade might lead to more GDP, but its all captured by those at the top. But sadly, we don’t even have to make that argument. The truth is that since NAFTA, Mexico’s economy has done really poorly. Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) wrote two years ago, NAFTA: 20 Years of Regret for Mexico. And he summed up what the first two decades brought Mexico:

If you want to take a deep dive into the subject, check out the CEPR document, Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years (PDF).

Weisbrot’s colleague at CEPR, Dean Baker, has been documenting the way that The Washington Post consistently exaggerates how well the Mexican economy has done. This is entirely typical of mainstream US news coverage. And it is in direct contrast to its coverage of official US government enemies like Venezuela, where nothing that they do will ever be seen as good.

The truth of the matter is that trade deals like NAFTA are created by the rich for the benefit of the rich. And even economists who once thought they were wonderful (for theoretical reasons), are now backing away. As Weisbrot noted, “When economists who have promoted NAFTA from the beginning are called upon to defend the agreement, the best that they can offer is that it increased trade.” But no one cares about trade as a goal; it is a means to a goal: shared prosperity. And Mexico has not shared in that prosperity.

Matt Bruenig brought my attention to something, Diaper Stamps. It’s the kind of idea that I very much associate with the modern Democratic Party. The thought is great: give poor people access to diapers. But the implementation is just awful. To begin with, a whole new program for diapers?! Why not a special program for car seats? And blankets? And those mobiles people hang over cribs?! Really: why don’t we create a program for every single aspect of the lives of poor people? Because that’s what this is all about. Underneath this proposal is the idea that the poor can’t manage their own lives.

We have conservatives like David Brooks and Charles Murray who tell us that the poor suffer from some sort of cultural problem. That is why they are poor. If only they acted like the middle class then they would magically be in the middle class. It’s offensive. Most of the time, it is racist — implicitly or explicitly. But at least these guys know what they are doing. They want their taxes low and so it is just good rhetoric to come up with “reasons” to do nothing about poverty. The situation is rather worse for liberals.

In my experience, upper income liberals buy into the exact same garbage that Brooks and Murray push, but they aren’t aware of it. This is why they are always coming up with programs where poor people are told what to buy. You see, the poor can’t be trusted. So the two sides of the political fence on the issue of the poor is either do nothing (conservative) or treat them as if they were children (liberal). It’s shameful.

I think the reason we have this is because Americans have convinced themselves that we do not live in a class system. In the UK, people are much more likely to see that people are born, live, and die poor because that’s just the way it is. But here, in the land of “opportunity,” anyone can supposedly grow up to be president. And in that paradigm, if people are poor, it is their own damned fault.

In my life, people tell me food stamp “horror stories” all the time. Let’s look at two classics:

• “I saw this guy at the grocery store buying a candy bar and a coke. And then he whips out his EBT card to pay for it! Can you believe it?!”
• “I saw this gal at the grocery store buying New York steak. And then she whips out her EBT card to pay for it! I wish I could afford to eat New York steak!

Note first the attribution bias here. All of the people complaining about the first case have, from time to time, eaten junk. But this one guy buying junk food with an EBT card is assumed to be the norm. That guy just doesn’t know how to feed himself! But the complainer would realize that they normally have a reason when they make each food choice. Similarly, in the second case, every complainer has eaten New York steak. It is probably even more unusual for the gal on food stamps.

But what’s even more telling in this is that people on food stamps can’t win. Unless they buy only dried rice and beans, someone is going to complain that they aren’t eating well enough or that they are eating too well. The truth, of course, is that, People on Food Stamps Make Healthier Grocery Decisions Than Most of Us. This is very much in alignment with the twice as good myth, a strain of African American thought that if they were just twice as good, the white community would accept them.

And the truth is that when the vast majority of people who get food stamps use them to make wise decisions, it is either not noticed or taken as the exception that proves the rule.

So diaper stamps. Instead of just giving poor people more money, kindhearted liberals want to give them diaper stamps. Matt Yglesias used to be fond of saying, “If you want to help the poor, give them money.” It’s a shockingly simple approach. Certainly too simple for the modern Democratic Party! But on most metrics, poor people are more reliable than affluent people. For example, they use drugs less. And there’s an obvious reason for that: drugs are expensive. But we keep pushing this idea that poor people can’t be trusted with money. And that’s just not true.

Afterword: The “Bad” Poor People

It is true that there are poor people who take loads of drugs. There are poor people who do lots of terrible things. But just because one poor person turns out to be a serial killer doesn’t mean we should put all poor people in jail. I’m making a case based upon the class of poor people. And they can be trusted. People who want to base policy on that one person they saw misusing food stamps are just idiots. Maybe we should start making food choices for them.