This is a picture of soldiers represented in an almost a Homeric vision of bravery — a wounded man being carried to safety as he fires at the enemy. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that it is an artistic construction made with toys. But it became a very big deal last week when a Facebook user posted it along with the caption, “As I see post after post about Bruce Jenner’s transition to a woman, and I hear words like, bravery, heroism, and courage, just thought I’d remind all of us what real American courage, heroism, and bravery looks like!” Ah yes, the fetishization of the military strikes again.

Let’s start with the fact that this is a totally cliched and limited idea of bravery. I don’t doubt that it takes great bravery to fight in a war. But for the people who fight the war, the alternative is prison and in some cases death. In many ways, standing up against the simple choice of going along and instead resisting a draft is more brave. But forget wars. There are lots of ways to be brave, and they usually involve going against the default behavior. It usually isn’t a question of doing what people will reward you for.

On the issue of Caitlyn Jenner, however, I don’t think we are talking about bravery. She is a public figure who is pimping a reality show. She has all the support that money and fame can buy. What she is doing is good for society and for the transgender community. But brave? I’m not convinced. For non-famous, non-rich people, coming out as transgender is incredibly brave. For Caitlyn Jenner — it’s at best less so.

But okay, people in the military do at times display amazing examples of bravery. But why of all the images that the poster could have picked, did he selected this one? After the post got nearly a million shares, he looked into the source of the photo. He found that it came from the documentary Marwencol. It is about Mark Hogancamp, a cross-dressing man who was beaten outside a bar — almost to death. Afterward, he got into building a model of a Belgian town during World War II. The fact that the poster had picked the work of a member of the transgender community made him rethink the whole thing. Now he thinks it was God working in mysterious ways to teach him about the importance of inclusion and love. Good for him!

But I don’t think that’s why he picked the photo. I think he picked it because it is a highly romanticize image of reality. When people talk about things like heroism, they are dealing with abstractions. What “real American courage, heroism, and bravery looks like” is dolls designed by a wounded outcast. In other words, what makes real America “real” is that it isn’t real.

This is something I’ve written about a lot in other contexts. The conservative image of “real America” is a place that never existed. And this, I think, explains why modern American conservatism is so nutty. It presents a false choice. The real choice is always between competing imperfect Americas. But in the conservative mind, it is between these imperfect choices and their idealized, perfect choice. It is no wonder that they are against compromise.

But it fills me with hope that the Facebook poster changed from slighting Jenner and defining “real” American heroism to writing, “Hate helps nothing. Love wounds no one.” It bothers me that all those people who shared the original sentiment will not land where the original poster did. But we take baby steps. And that’s good.

If you were a decent politician — one who cared about your constituents — you would plan ahead. If there was a tsunami coming, you would evacuate the coast and get clean-up crews ready for the resulting damage. But it seems that on the right in American politics, such basic actions don’t make sense. I think this is all part of the Republican Party exchanging competence for ideology. Because there are Republican governments all over the nation that are facing a major — and largely predictable — catastrophe: the ending of federal subsidies for people buying health insurance on the federal exchanges. And these governments are doing nothing to prepare.

The issue at hand is the case King v Burwell in front of the Supreme Court. If it finds for the defendants, then nothing happens. But if it finds for the plaintiffs, it’s going to be really bad — not just for the individuals who will lose their insurance, but also for the insurance companies and for the healthcare providers. So a group of healthcare researchers led by David K Jones decided to look at what is going on in five of the states that will be effected by the ruling: Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Utah. And it looks pretty bad, What Are The States Doing To Prepare For King v Burwell?

This article is just the first of three. But it provides the overall conclusions. And there are three of them. First, none of the states have a clear plan as to what they are going to do if the Supreme Court finds for the plaintiffs. Second, the governors seem to be open to some kind of a deal, but the legislators are not. And third, the timing is bad; only Michigan will have a legislature still in session after the ruling comes. Of course, even if that weren’t the case, there still wouldn’t be time to set up a state exchange for next year.

These observations are all annoying in their own way. The fact that the states have no plan is not surprising. If the worst comes to pass, they probably figure they might do something. But as long as they don’t have to do anything — they won’t. They are, in other words, hypocrites. I’m sure that the vast majority of these Republican legislators and governors are secretly hoping that the Supreme Court finds for the defendants. And they are thinking this privately even while publicly saying it is a great and just cause.

The Republican Party is out of control. It isn’t so much that Republican politicians can’t tell the truth to their base. Rather, it is that Republican politicians know that if they act reasonably about this (or pretty much anything else), another Republican politicians will come in and demagogue the issue. They know others will do this to them because they know they would do the same thing to others if they needed to. Forget the Eleventh Commandment, the Republican Party is now at the point of snake eating its own tail. They just can’t stop themselves from destroying themselves.

Clearly, the best thing for everyone is for the Supreme Court to find for the defendants in King v Burwell. But clearly, if that doesn’t happen, the problem is the Republicans’. And that’s another thing that was found in the Jones et al analysis. The Republicans believe they are going to be blamed for this. Yet even then, they can’t manage to do anything. If they use their power for the common good, they will likely lose that power at the next election. If they don’t use their power for the common good, what is the purpose of having that kind of “power”? The choice they will make is clear.

Last weekend, I wrote, Public Shaming and the Power of Employers. In it, I argued that public shaming did great harm primarily because it leads to job loss. The issue is not so much that people are just awful to each other, but rather that workers in modern America have little control of their work lives. In the example that I used from So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, a white man ended up with very little harm done because he immediately got another job. The black woman, however, was still unemployed years after her public shaming. As usual, our society refuses to engage with the injustice of the economic system itself.

A couple of days ago, a guy writing under the pseudonym Edward Schlosser wrote an article at Vox, I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me. The article quickly became a big deal. Jonathan Chait was right on top of it with yet another of this articles, “See, I was right!” And conservatives everywhere just love this because they want to claim that the real intolerant ones are not people who want to deny rights to others, but rather liberals who informally police speech. To be honest, I find the whole thing exhausting.

Let’s start with the fact that young people yelling at old people is a rite of passage. For my entire life there have been college students making grand statements about how their college professors are offensive and just don’t get it. Even Jonathan Chait admits that the political correctness that he talks about is just a “wave.” The exact same complaints date back at least to the 1960s, but apparently Chait doesn’t know anything before his time. As far as I can tell, there have been student rebellions for as long as there have been colleges. I don’t see any reason to think this “wave” is any worse or even different from earlier “waves.”

Amanda Taub wrote a great response to Professor Schlosser’s article, I Was a Liberal Adjunct Professor. My Liberal Students Didn’t Scare Me at All. She gets at what I was talking about regarding shame. The issue isn’t that the students are particularly horrible. And it most certainly isn’t that the students have more power. It is that the professors have far less power than they used to — relative to the administration. She quoted an amazing statistic from the American Association of University Professors: only 24% of professors are tenure or tenure track. The rest are adjuncts, which are generally temporary positions that pay poorly and have no benefits — the minimum wage job of the PhD crowd. And that means that tenured professors are afraid because “there’s a mile-long line of applicants eager to take their place.”

Taub summed up the issue well:

She then went on to discuss the way the whole issue gets distorted. It strikes me as very American. People in most nations look at the world very much in terms of class. But we have a bias against that. We want to see everything as individual against individual — or at least one group against another group with roughly equal power. As a result, we have ended up with the ridiculous system we have where those with actual power are never held to account or, as in this case, even blamed.

Students are as they ever were. After the power elite spent decades attacking teachers at all levels, it isn’t surprising that teachers at all levels would find they have greatly reduced power. What is outrageous, however, is that people like Jonathan Chait and Edward Schlosser would focus on an irrelevance and ignore the real power that is hurting professors and academic freedom.

Jonathan Chait is right about this, Hillary Clinton Calls the Republican Bluff on Voting Rights. It’s about Clinton’s call last week for automatic voter registration. The summary of the article is, “A new idea to make voting easy that Republicans will have to come up with a reason to oppose.” Because that really is the issue. Republicans have come out big in recent years for making voting as hard as possible. It is always posed as fighting against “voter fraud.” But in fact, it is just a way to get as few people voting as possible because the more people who vote the better liberal politicians and ideas do.

At the end of his article, Chait highlights Daniel Foster in National Review, who wrote, Don’t Make Democracy More Like The Internet. He claimed that automatic voter registration would be “a terrible idea” and “not just because it would certainly be devastating to the electoral prospects of conservatives.” And then he goes on to explain why democracy is a bad thing and it should be limited to those who care enough to jump through all the hoops. He claimed that sure, “dolts” (his word) ought to have the right to vote if they are willing to do everything that Republicans do to stop them, but “that doesn’t mean we have to encourage” them.

This is a standard argument that I have heard from conservatives for decades. But it is fundamentally wrong. Older people are more likely to vote than younger people, but that doesn’t mean that they care more about voting. Older people have — on average — huge advantages that make voting easy for them: they don’t have children to care for; they don’t have jobs to go to; they don’t move often. So arguments like those of Foster are not about who cares the most about politics; they are about which demographics are seen as better because they are more likely to vote for conservatives.

In general, when people complain to me about voters who don’t understand the issues, it turns out that the complainer is extremely ignorant about the issues. The argument really only ever means, “These people don’t agree with me!” Of course, Fox News has made this infinitely worse by allowing its addicts to think that they are being well informed when they are actually being well disinformed. The people who just watch the nightly news are usually better informed that Fox News viewers — except when it comes to Solyndra and Jade Helm.

Democracy is an extremely humble form of government. It is dependent upon the idea that none of us has a monopoly on the truth and so we are better off getting everyone’s input. Conservatives have never much liked this idea. They see democracy as mob rule. And indeed, it can be. But not having democracy leads inexorably to tyranny. The alternative to democracy isn’t some perfect as yet undisclosed system. But conservatives continue to push against democracy because they ultimately believe in monarchy — just one that they are in control of.

At the same time that conservatives are pushing for less democracy, they are undermining the very idea of absolute truth. This is what is behind their war science. So they aren’t even making the argument that the masses get certain issues wrong on a factual basis. Conservatives don’t even care about the factual basis of their claims. They just want the world to work a certain way, and if that isn’t true, they don’t care. They are the ones who define reality. That’s why Sam Brownback claimed that cutting corporate and other taxes on the rich would increase revenue for the state, and after the opposite happened, he continues to stay the course.

The question is whether the conservatives will come up with a better argument than Daniel Foster did to counter Hillary Clinton’s idea to make voter registration automatic. My guess is that they won’t. They will just bluster their way through it. They will never say that democracy is bad, but they will make their “only people who care” argument. They will throw in a little “voter fraud” and how we can’t do a thing until there is not a single fraudulent vote in the nation. And they will just move on. Don’t expect the media establishment to question them.

My father has been watch The Roosevelts. And in relationship to it, he told me, “Roosevelt wanted there to be a lockbox on Social Security.” I sighed heavily. Suddenly, I was transported back into the 2000s and 1990s — the last two periods when everyone was talking about the Social Security lockbox. The problem with it is that it is meaningless. Actually, it is worse than meaningless. The idea of a lockbox is put forward to scare people into thinking that the federal government is stealing money out of the Social Security trust fund in order to pay for Cadillacs for welfare queens.

You probably remember George W Bush, in 2005 after his re-election, going around telling people that there was no money in the trust fund. It was just paper — IOUs! Of course, that’s all cash is. But more to the point, that’s all that bank accounts are. I don’t have money in the bank. I have a number on a ledger. In effect, I have an IOU from the bank. And if the bank goes out of business, I would lose that money except for the fact that that the government guarantees it. So what exactly did Bush think would be in the trust fund? Piles of cash?

It turns out that the Social Security Trust fund is currently worth over $2.5 trillion. There is only about half that much in total cash in the United States. So what are we to do with this money? It needs to be invested one way or another. So the Social Security Administration (SSA) does what everyone the world over does with money they need safely stored: they invest it in US government securities. The fact that one government program is loaning its money to another part of the government does not mean that the money is being stolen.

Think about it with regard to individual investors. They generally have a mix of stocks and bonds. Those bonds generally include a lot of US government bonds. No one — Really: no one — says that these investors are just being ripped off by the federal government because it spends the money that it borrows. Rather, everyone agrees that US government debt is about the safest investment in the world. How safe? Right now, US 10 Year Treasury bonds have a yield of 2.31%. That’s with an average inflation rate last year of 1.6%. (Note: inflation has basically been zero thus far this year.)

So what exactly is the lockbox supposed to do? It is a “solution” to a nonexistent problem. Suppose we hired Donald Trump to administer the Social Security program. All the money coming in would go to him. He would then have to do something with that money. I don’t know what he would do with it, and given my low opinion of him, I would expect the worst. But even aggressive investors would take a large fraction of that money and put it into US government securities. This is exactly what the SSA does. Money isn’t being stolen from Social Security. There is no need for a lockbox and people who talk about it are just trying to scare you.