Well, the Republican debate is coming up. I hope you are excited! As you read this, I am at the county fair being impressed by the local arts and crafts. But for those looking forward to the debate, Jonathan Bernstein reminds you, How Debate Moderators Get It Wrong. And he makes an excellent point, which explains why I won’t be watching: debates should be about introducing candidates to the public. It isn’t about the moderators — or people like me who are very well informed about what all these fools are campaigning on. Actually, it makes me feel better about missing it, because I would only be there for the worst reasons.

According to Bernstein, there are basically only two kinds of questions that should be asked at debates:

1. What policies the candidates support on the various issues
2. What they think about things as a way of finding who they are as people

He thinks that “gotcha,” tactical, current event, and attack invitation questions are all invalid. I agree. For one thing, “gotcha” questions are almost always about “flip-flopping” and those are just stupid. The current events are horrible. I’m sure there will be lots of questions about Planned Parenthood, and all they really come down to is the policy question: each and every one of them believes abortion should be illegal. What Planned Parenthood did or did not do has nothing to do with it. As for attacking other candidates, that’s just silly, because they don’t need an excuse to do that.

But there is no doubt that policy questions could be a whole lot better. For example, on the abortion issue, I would very much like it if we could get all the candidates on record. They are all anti-choice, of course. But do they believe in abortion in the case of rape? What about life of the mother? This last one is critical, because if you don’t believe in a life of the mother exception, you really do just hate women. In that case, there are competing rights and you are coming down squarely on the side of an unborn baby. But I’d like to know if any of them would go that far. I think Carson might. And so too might Huckabee. Maybe others. I don’t know. But let’s nail that down.

But there won’t be anything like that. It would tell the audience something for them to go down the line. They could ask, “Are you pro-life?” And they would answer: yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But it will be worse than that. They will all get away with rhetoric like, “I always am going to err on the side of life. I believe life is precious. I have been in the pro-life camp since I was a teenager.” So within the framework that Bernstein has put out, you could have a very good, informative debate; and you could have an awful one.

As for the personal stories — who is behind the candidate — I guess I disagree with Bernstein about that one. At one time, that might have been fine. But today, in the world of constant polling and focus groups, that’s all so managed as to mean nothing. If every campaign had an official comic strip, it would say more about the candidates than the “narratives” their campaigns sell.

I hope the debate is good. I’m sure I’ll see parts of it. I may even watch the whole thing later if it sounds like it is worth it. But it isn’t worth doing on spec. And I really deserve this day off. I’ve been promising myself for weeks.

I had been planning to live blog today’s Fox News Republican presidential debate. But after my experience on Monday, I’ve decided against doing it. In fact, I am going to do everything I can to avoid even seeing the debate. And I know: I’ll miss out on a few good moments. And Trump might be a lot of fun. But I’ve been through this before. It’s a lot of time to waste just waiting for the occasional Oops! or Let him die! It is mostly just the candidates being in absolute unanimity about even the most extreme of positions.

Think back to the 2012 Republican debates. Bret Baier asked the candidates, “Say you had a deal — a real spending cuts deal: ten to one… spending cuts to tax increases… Who on this stage would walk away from that deal?” Not one them would. Not even the supposed reasonable guy, Jon Huntsman. No, the Republicans are the party of “all or nothing.” They are a revolutionary group where no one is allowed to disagree on policy. They are only allowed to disagree on how loud they shout about it. If the Republicans weren’t such authoritarians, they would have split up into endless factions by now.

Consider how that would have gone at a Democratic debate, “Say you had a deal — a real tax increase deal: ten to one… tax increases to to spending cuts. Who on this stage would walk away from that deal?” Well, they might all walk away from it, but not because they didn’t think that was enough of a compromise. Of course, the question doesn’t make much sense either way. The question was originally just to hammer the point that Republicans will never raise taxes. Baier could have made it a million to one and at least six of the eight would have walked away — and very likely all of them.

The mistake I made before was remembering back on previous general election debates. In those at least, there are two sides. On Monday, I watched in horror as candidate after candidate talked about how Planned Parenthood was selling fetal tissue without even a hint of push back, much less any actual truth being presented. And that was true of just about every issue. The only thing that was ever pressed was what the candidates might do about all the problems and non-problems they were whining about. And they had no answers. It was the same old stuff that they want to do for different reasons. There was no Democrat to counter any of the nonsense.

But there is something else that was missing: alcohol. During the 2012 general election debates, I was always drinking. That helps a great deal. And in that regard, let me recommend Matt Terzi’s article, The 2016 GOP Presidential Debate Drinking Game! But let me caution you: the drinks have to have a low alcohol content. The rules are such that if you were drinking hard alcohol, you would be passed out after five minutes. For example, you are supposed to drink once when someone mentions “Obamacare.” That alone is likely to result in 40-50 drinks. I really liked this part of the game:

So be careful if you play the game. As for me, I’m planning to go to the fair that day.

Matt Taibbi totally nailed the danger of Donald Trump last week, In the Age of Trump, Will Democrats Sell Out More, Or Less? There are a lot of liberals who like the idea of the Republican Party getting so insane that they are unelectable. I’ve never been one. It is still going to depend upon the voters. And if they are not careful, the Democratic Party will do what seems to come naturally: move to the right. As Taibbi put it, “History shows that if the Republican Party pushes further in the direction of brainless nativism and economic reaction, the Democrats will probably follow right behind them.”

This is what the New Democrats were all about. If you believe that the country really did move rapidly to the right in the 1970s and 1980s, then the idea of moving the Democrats to the right was a good idea. But that is a misreading of history. What’s more, the New Democrats embraced social liberalism — the only kind of liberalism that a case could be made against. Now there are reasons for this; the New Democrats were funded by a bunch of economic conservatives. And there will always be a lot more money to be made pushing economic conservatism.

The primary target of Taibbi’s article is the recent Politico article by Barney Frank, Why Progressives Shouldn’t Support Bernie. It was an unfortunate display. Frank claimed that Bernie Sanders couldn’t win the general election. There is exactly zero evidence of that. As I talk about all the time, if the economy collapsed next year, Donald Trump would have little difficulty winning the general election. And conversely, if the economy continues to grow through 2016, and Bernie Sanders is the Democratic presidential candidate, he will win. I still don’t really understand why it is that everyone thinks presidential politics is so very personal. It isn’t.

The core of Frank’s argument is that the Democrats are going to need lots of money to beat the Republicans. Again: this just isn’t true. I’m with Bruce Bartlett on this issue. Clearly: candidates need a critical mass of funding. But the vast majority of the money spent in these high profile elections is just wasted. A good example of this is 2010 race for California governor. Meg Whitman had vastly more money than Jerry Brown, yet she lost by 13 percentage points. And it certainly seems that under most circumstances, the winning candidate gets more money because the funders see that the candidate is going to win. Regardless, we shouldn’t encourage this kind of corruption. And thinking that Sanders can’t win because he isn’t going to be able to raise a billion dollars just feeds into that.

Taibbi pointed out that this “move to the right” and “choose the electable lesser evil” nonsense has a long history with very predictable arguments. And the biggest part of that argument is that people like Hillary Clinton are actually true liberals inside. The argument goes that she is just “pragmatic.” Well, I believe that to some extent. The problem is that being “pragmatic” tends to become a habit. Clinton has now publicly supported a $12 minimum wage. But if she had gotten through the whole campaign without endorsing that, it would likely have stayed buried deep in her liberal heart where she keeps all the other things that “sure would be nice in a perfect world…”

Ultimately, I no longer look at elections as events. Certainly I think it will be terrible for the nation if a Republican becomes president in 2016. But the big issue over the last 40 years has been that the entire playing field of politics has moved to the right. Now on trade agreements, the only thing the parties disagree about are the exact details of the deals. Obama isn’t against these deals — he just wants to make them a little less worse for the American worker. On the minimum wage, now we have to listen to large numbers of people in the Republican Party claiming that we should have no minimum wage at all. And both parties are obsessed with job killing policies like low inflation and strong dollar.

Our only hope — and it is not much of one — is that the people pay attention and force our leaders to do what is right. Bernie Sanders is a good choice for us. But I even think that Hillary Clinton could be good if we force her to be. But if we can’t even manage to vote for the candidate we really agree with, how are we going to hold candidates accountable afterward?

I’ve been fascinated to watch the campaign for the British Labour Party leadership. It is both cheering and depressing. On the cheering side: politics in the UK are just as screwed up as they are here. On the depressing side: politics in the UK are just as screwed up as they are here. Last Friday, Simon Wren-Lewis wrote, Corbyn’s Popularity and Relativistic Politics. The big thing in this election is that the establishment types think that Labour should pick Liz Kendall. That’s because she’s a neoliberal. The establishment always wants the choice limited to: “privatize everything” and “privatize almost everything.”

The problem is that the actual people in the Labour Party prefer Jeremy Corbyn — an old school leftist. The fact that he is doing well should not come as a surprised. After all, if voters were conservative, they would join the Conservative Party. But what’s fascinating is the advice that if Labour wants to be competitive, it must run screaming to the right. Remember: this is a parliamentary system. Different smaller parties merge to form governing coalitions. So it isn’t necessary to go with the “lesser evil” the way it is in our system. Of course, the Conservative Party now has a single party majority in parliament — one they got despite winning only about a third of the vote. The UK system is far from perfect.

But it seems clear to me that the Labour Party’s constant movement to the right has not worked out too well for it. That really shouldn’t come as a surprise. What I’ve seen in this country is that as the Democratic Party moves further and further to the right on economic and military issues, it doesn’t actually get any creative for it. People in general still think that the Republicans are better on the budget and “security” than the Democrats — all evidence to the contrary. So are the voters of the UK really going to reward the Labour Party if it becomes Conservative Party Lite? I don’t think so.

The claim is that it is all about competitiveness. Richard Seymour at Lenin’s Tomb recently wrote, Project Fear Versus Corbyn. He pointed out that there had long been this pretense among pundits that the Conservatives weren’t afraid of Corbyn; they were actually afraid of Kendall. It’s ridiculous, but it is the kind of thing that we see here all the time. Somehow the Republicans are never afraid of Democrats who might actually challenge them, but are instead afraid of some milquetoast centrist. Well, now that Corbyn is ahead in the polls, the establishment is freaking out, “Corbyn supporters are either simple-minded, tribal thugs from the paleolithic era, or hysterics who think with their emotions and hormones, or sun-stroked hippies who think of little but rainbows and fluffy wuffy clouds.”

It all reminds me of what Noam Chomsky said in The Common Good:

That’s what’s really going on. The establishment exists to limit debate. And there are good aspects to this. I’m certainly glad that we don’t constantly have to relitigate slavery. But the conventional wisdom is so often wrong on more mundane topics, that its very harmful. I can well see people a hundred years from now asking, “The evidence was overwhelming that they lived in an oligarchy where people were trapped at the economic level they were born; why didn’t they see that?” I think we know why: it is very helpful to certain powerful people who control the discussion. Don’t listen to them.

I just watched the first Republican presidential “forum.” It was incredibly painful because it was just an excuse for all the candidates to come by and spout their talking points. I’m all for a non-combative environment where politicians can talk about their policies. But there was literally none of that. It was all posturing. By far, the most serious person at the “forum” was Rick Santorum. And this kind of thing always makes me think just how far the Republican Party has sunk. But I’m thinking back to the 1950s. Because I’m not at all sure that the Republican Party has gotten worse in my lifetime.

Paul Krugman recently wrote, Cap and Trade and Polarization. In it, he counter the idea that the two parties have been symmetrical in their extremism. And he pointed out that Republicans were originally for ideas like cap and trade and what would eventually become Obamacare. But Jonathan Chait has addressed this regarding Obamacare, The Heritage Uncertainty Principle. That’s the idea that Republicans are only in favor of healthcare reform if the plan is unrealistic. The moment that it becomes possible legislation, it is, “Socialism! Socialism, I tell you!”

But that’s clearly the case with just about everything for the last 50 years. In 1961, Reagan was saying that Medicare would be the end of freedom in America. Today, Medicare is pretty much untouchable. But there is no doubt that if it came up for a vote today, the Republicans would never vote for it. But that’s actually the opposite of the Heritage Uncertainty Principle. In general, what goes on is that Republicans pretend to be for some centrist policy, only to turn against it when it becomes reality. The Heritage proposal came out in 1993. The only reason it came out was to counter the more liberal Clinton healthcare reform. And the only reason the Republicans were for cap and trade was to counter more direct forms for environmental regulation.

So at least for 30 years, Republicans have brought up proposals that they had no intention of ever supporting — only as a way of destroying more liberal policies. Obamacare itself is a great conservative victory. That’s not because it is a conservative law. It is fairly liberal. But it is not as liberal as it would have been if there hadn’t been an alternative around. The fact is that our healthcare system could not continue on as it had been. We were going to get something one way or another. And the Republicans managed to stop us from getting a single payer healthcare system.

Scott Lemieux wrote a very interesting article over at The Week, John Roberts Has Been Trying to Gut the Voting Rights Act for Decades. It is about how the Republican Party has had an explicit policy to not counter the Voting Rights Act in the legislature. It’s too politically hot. But at the executive and judicial levels, they have been trying to destroy it. This goes right along with what I’m talking about: the Republicans know that their ideas are toxic.

And the whole thing reminds me of something some blogger said a while back about how exhausting it was to be a Republican, because he always had to pretend to believe something that he really didn’t. This was well on display at the “forum.” We heard lots of stuff about helping the middle class. But the ideas were all the same things that they always want to do. Somehow, we are supposed to believe that they want to cut the taxes of the rich because it will provide good jobs for the rest of society. Or we have to repeal Obamacare so that Americans will have the “choice” to go without insurance.

It’s really pathetic. Republicans always get about half of the votes in any election in this country. But they don’t care a lick about the vast majority of Americans. They lie again and again. And they get caught again and again. But it doesn’t matter. There is no accountability.

Update (5 August 2015 1:02 am)

John Whitehead at Environmental Economics wrote, A Note on the Accuracy of Krugman’s “Cap and Trade Began as a Republican Idea.” It turns out that environmentalists were the first to push cap and trade. But the point is the same: conservatives picked up on it as a way to avoid a more liberal approach to climate change. By the way, I just discovered Whitehead and he’s a very interesting guy. I encourage you to check out his blog.