Any connection between the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church and the Confederate flag is, of course, indirect. So don’t consider this article about that vile act. People have been talking about the Confederate flag and that’s a good thing. But I will repeat what I’ve said many times over the last several years: I hate the Confederate flag. As I wrote back in January, “Martin Luther King Jr was born and raised in Georgia. Yet I’ve never seen anyone wearing a t-shirt with his image as an act of ‘southern pride.’ No. ‘Southern pride’ is always expressed with the Confederate flag, Stonewall Jackson, or Robert E Lee.”

There is no doubt that the Confederate flag is a racist symbol. But again, let’s leave that aside. As we all know, most of the people fighting for the Confederacy were not slave owners. But beyond slavery, the Civil War was the answer to a great question: is our allegiance to our state or our country? And the answer to that was resounding: it is to the country. States have lots of nice things and they have control over certain aspects of government. But we are all Americans and to put South Carolina above the United States is an act of treason.

But like I said, that was an arguable question 150 years ago. And that’s perhaps why the liberals of that time said to the south, “Welcome back!” There was no punishment. Even the President of the Confederacy — a man who under most circumstances would have been hanged along with many others — spent just two years in federal custody and then went on to have a successful life, dying rich and having a huge public funeral. This was the early version of Obama’s looking forward. And the conservatives responded to that the same way they responded to Obama’s mercy.

As the Union moved on and forgot about the Civil War, the south did not move on. Instead, it wrapped itself in the flag of the Confederacy. It created myths about the righteousness of its cause. And so every time southerners bring out the flag, they are saying, “We were right!” It is not even a question of them trying to claim that they weren’t traitors — which they most clearly were. That would be understandable — especially if people commonly talked about the treasonous Robert E Lee. But they don’t. In fact, he is widely seen as a hero, much to my personal disgust. And these people are not asking for absolution for their forefathers’ treason.

But the people who continue to wrap themselves in the Confederate flag are the same people who claim to have some kind of a monopoly on the “real” America. Yet they clearly don’t care about America as it is. It is instead “America.” And that’s why we get this nonsense from the supposed Constitutional Conservatives that “the powers not expressly delegated to the United States” are given to the states. Except that isn’t what the Constitution says. That’s what the Articles of Confederation said, and what the south tried to re-establish when it revolted against the United States.

To me, the Confederate flag is very simple: it is the flag of a failed country that attacked the United States and started the most deadly war we have ever had in terms of our own casualties. Almost half the population of North Dakota are people of German descent. Would anyone find it acceptable for the state to fly the Nazi flag? Even apart from its obvious racism and offensiveness to Jews (and basically everyone else), it would be offensive to the very idea of the United States of America. It would be like having a Fort Rommel.

Yet there the Confederate flag is. I live in liberal northern California and I still see it everywhere. I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t be allowed to display the flag. But I am saying that we should treat people who display it the same way we treat people sporting Nazi tattoos.

Brian Beutler wrote a very interesting take on, Why Republicans Didn’t Want to Say the Charleston Killer Is a Racist. He distinguished between the Republican presidential candidates not wanting to take a stand against the Confederate flag and not wanting to to call the massacre at the Emanuel AME church a racist hate crime. There probably are a whole lot more Republican flag lovers than Republicans who would be offending by saying a white separatist kid who kills nine African Americans is a racist. So why all the confusion from the candidates?

Beutler thinks it is fundamentally ideological, “Republicans are reluctant to attribute anything serious in American society to racism, because so many Republican dogmas are premised on the notion that racism has been all but wiped out in America.” He related it to global warming and the new Republican excuse for not having an opinion on it, “I’m not a scientist.” With the racism question, it is, “I can’t say what he was thinking.” But it all comes down to the idea that if you admit that there is a problem, you have to do something about it. And both those problems imply distinctly liberal solutions. The truth is that conservatives have no solutions to them.

I agree with all of this, but I think it goes deeper. Another aspect of it is Henry Kissinger’s idea of a revolutionary power, and the fact that the Republicans have become one. The whole party has given up on practical politics. It is now focused entirely on ideology. And that ideology is basically that the government shouldn’t be involved in anything but going to war (and stopping women from having abortions). So even to admit that anything is wrong in society is to open oneself to the charge of lacking purity in pursuit of the the “limited government” ideal.

But this is true only of the base. The Republicans understand that their broader appeal is based upon an unstated racism. Why is welfare bad? You can talk all you want about moochers and hammocks. But the appeal of slashing welfare is based primarily on the image of black people in public housing waiting for their welfare check. Cliven Bundy spoke what usually goes unsaid in the Republican Party, “I would see these old government houses, and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do.” They do nothing; just sit around waiting for those sweet, sweet welfare checks. Of course, those sweet, sweet welfare checks are a thing of the past — thanks to Bill Clinton’s welfare “reform.” But no one seems to know that.

The power the Republicans’ appeal is based on the idea that there is an underclass — and we all know what that underclass looks like — that is stealing all our hard earned money. So it isn’t surprising that Republicans would be disinclined to talk about race at all. The more explicit race is in the public conversation, the less powerful it is. Most people in the center — and certainly on the left — do not want to think of themselves as racists. The moment we start talking explicitly about race, these people become hyper-aware of racist appeals. And the Republican appeal loses much of its power.

So it is certainly good that Nikki Haley and Ben Carson are talking about racism and the Confederate flag. But generally speaking, it is bad for the Republican Party. Because resentment of minority groups is the primary product that the party has to sell.

Jonathan Chait called my attention to something I had missed in Rand Paul’s new flat tax proposal that I discussed yesterday, Again With the Flat Tax! But as Chait pointed out, one of Paul’s reasons for his flat tax is to save us from the nefarious IRS, “We now know that the IRS, through political hacks like former IRS official Lois Lerner, routinely abused its auditing power to build an enemies list and harass anyone who might be adversarial to President Obama’s policies.” Chait responded that, first, a flat tax wouldn’t change the IRS’s ability to do this. And second, what Paul is saying is absolute nonsense: it never happened.

On the first point, this goes along with all this “Abolish the IRS” nonsense. People really think that if we have a flat tax or some other conservative wet dream, then there would be no need for a tax collector. There have been tax collectors since the beginning of civilization. But according to Rand Paul and company, if we just lower taxes enough, everyone will be glad to pay them. We know this isn’t true because throughout my entire lifetime, taxes on the rich have gone down and down and down. Yet the rich complain more about the taxes they pay now than they ever did. If they were required to pay no taxes at all, the rich would complain that they aren’t being given money because of all the “job creation” they do.

But I’m really struck by the fact that Rand Paul is using this tired old story about the IRS going after Obama’s enemies. There was never any indication of this. Even at the time. The idea that the IRS was going after conservative groups was simply the creation of the right wing echo chamber. Even since Nixon, Republicans have been desperately searching for a Democrat who has an “enemies list.” This is the conservative way: whatever they do must be done on the other side. Sadly, most of the media go right along with this — effectively enabling the bad behavior by the Republicans.

Sadly, I have little doubt that Rand Paul actually believes this nonsense. That’s the whole point of the right wing echo chamber: you never have to hear anything that disturbs you. So why doesn’t the left wing have a similarly sealed echo chamber? It is usually claimed this is because liberals are, well, liberal: they like to get a lot of different opinions. I don’t think that’s really it. I think the problem is that in the modern conservative movement, the ideas are so bad that the only way that they can be maintained by Rand Paul and company is for no counter arguments to ever be heard. How else do you continue on thinking that if only we give yet another tax break to millionaires then our economy will get a “steroid injection”?

But count on this: NBC News will not be reporting that Rand Paul is using patently false claims to justify his new tax scheme. No, it will all just be ignored. Because if there is one thing that the mainstream media know, it is that the Democrats must be doing the exact same thing. They just haven’t found it yet. But don’t worry: if they ever do, they will report on that!

Last week, Mark Thoma wrote, Blow Up the Tax Code and Start Over??? He started it with, “Here we go again with the flat tax proposals.” Of course! Because this is the start of the presidential election and the flat tax is about the only policy the Republicans have that sounds appealing. Of course, it isn’t appealing. As long as people like Rand Paul (the case at hand) stay vague, it all sounds great. It is only when they get down to the details that we see that everyone who makes less than a hundred grand a year will end up paying more in taxes.

The reason that the flat tax sounds so appealing is that everyone thinks that filing taxes is a pain. It is! Even if you just have to file 1040-EZ, it’s still a pain. No one likes paper work. So the idea that we could just write down how much money we made and multiply it by some percentage rate sounds great. But wait: that isn’t what people hate about filing their taxes. No one says, “Oh, I have no problem with all the work I do to figure out my adjusted gross income; but looking up my tax in that table! That’s just terrible!”

So that’s the truth of the matter: the marginal tax rates are absolutely the least onerous part of filing our taxes. And that’s the only thing that would change with a flat tax. And even it wouldn’t be an improvement! What’s harder: looking up a number in a table or multiplying one number with another? I think it’s a wash. So you have to wonder: why are conservatives so all fired excited about the flat tax? There’s no surprise in that answer. As with all efforts by conservatives to “reform” the tax code, the intention is to lower taxes on the rich and raise them on the poor.

This is why conservatives have a laser focus on the federal income tax: it is modestly progressive. State income taxes tend to be pretty flat. State sales taxes are regressive. Property taxes are flat. And the payroll tax — the biggest federal tax on the working poor — is highly (Ridiculously!) regressive. Forget all you hear from libertarians about how great “local control” is. The reason they believe in “local control” is because the poor are usually stuck wherever they are but the rich can move anywhere they want. Thus local governments gouge the poor and let the rich off so as not to cause them to move away.

Thoma noted that even Rand Paul admitted that his flat tax would lower the taxes on the rich. But in order to offset this, Paul claims that the tax loopholes mostly benefit the rich. There is something to that. But it is clear this is just a way for Paul to imply that his flat tax wouldn’t be a giveaway to the rich without having to actually show this. But it’s just perfect: make the one modestly progressive tax in the United State flat because that’s “fair.” But ignore all the other taxes that harm the poor.

Of course, according to Paul, his “Fair and Flat Tax” would create an economic boom. He knows this because he had the people at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation look at his plan. The Tax Foundation may be nonpartisan, but it is conservative — very conservative. Thoma — who is usually pretty restrained — commented, “I bet it would almost be as good for the economy as the Bush tax cuts. Oh wait…” But I think it is amazing that the mainstream media allow Republicans like Rand Paul to talk about the federal income tax to the exclusion of all other taxes. The only people who really care about that tax are the rich. How about we talk about the payroll tax? If we got rid of the cap, maybe we could lower that tax rate.