I really am a terrible partisan. I suppose it was clear enough after the election in 2012. It seems that every couple of days I was writing the same article about how stupid it was that people were saying that the Republicans would have to yield to the Democrats because of their poor showing in the election. What nonsense that was! The Republicans still had control of the House and just because the Democrats had done well nationally, didn’t mean that any given Republican should change; they still had the same conservative constituency. Of course, it wasn’t even Democratic partisans who were saying these kinds of things. That was just the conventional wisdom of our hopelessly centrist media establishment.

It is two years later and these same nitwits are saying the same thing, but with the parts reversed. What exactly are the Republicans going to do if Obama doesn’t pander to them? Impeach him? I’m sure Joe Biden wouldn’t mind running the country on autopilot for the next two years, as Obama is expected to. How the Senate would ever get 67 votes, I cannot say. So it is all nonsense and I wish as much now as I did then that people would just shut up. There is only so much brain dead analysis I can take.

But you won’t be seeing me write multiple articles on this subject. It is different being on this side of it. I don’t even want to think about the election. The only thing I can do is look to the future and hopefully build a better — more liberal — Democratic Party. But more than that, I feel that my repeated expression of annoyance would be seen as sour grapes. God knows, I got no praise from Republicans about my defense of them in 2012; but I feel certain that I would get complaints from them now if I actively defended the Democrats — even though I would do it in an entirely nonpartisan way. All I really care about is that people see political reality and stop living in some mythical land where parties have “mandates.”

As bad as the mainstream press is, the conservative press is just loony. Ed Kilgore brought my attention to the following bit of hilarity from Charles “If you speak softly, you can get away with the craziest things!” Krauthammer, Seize the Day, Control the Agenda:

Ah, yes! America spoke! Kilgore noted, “No, Charles, 38% of eligible voters ‘spoke,’ in a tilted battleground, and 52% of them voted Republican while 48% did not. It was a big defeat for Democrats, of course, but not the end of the Thirty Years War. Get a grip.” It is kind of like saying that the English people spoke when Henry Tudor became king. After all, the only people who mattered had spoken — namely Henry Tudor.

What’s annoying about this kind of triumphalism — and it is everywhere on the right now — is that any reasonable person knows that it isn’t true. The Democrats didn’t do better in 2012 than in 2010 because the people had changed their minds; they did better because more people voted. If the people who voted in 2012 had voted in 2010, the Democrats would have done well. And that’s true of 2014 too. The people didn’t turn against the Democrats; the Democratic voters just didn’t turn up.

I’m not suggesting that this isn’t bad news for the Democrats. It is a minor catastrophe. It says some very troubling things about the Democratic coalition. But it doesn’t say a damned thing about changes in America because there haven’t been any changes in America. The same people who hated Obama in 2008 also hated him in 2010, 2012, and 2014. Now things will probably change. In 2024, these people will probably look back fondly on Obama and think he was pretty good — at least compared to whatever socialist is in the White House at that point.

I have done my best to avoid coverage of the election. Part of it is just to avoid the nonsense. But another part of it is that conservatives are as bad at winning as they are at losing. I really do not remember this kind of exultation by the Democrats in 2012 or even in 2008. I think it is the authoritarian nature of conservatism. What’s the point of winning if you don’t get to rape and pillage, am I right?! Well, no: I’m not right. They really are awful people.

Not depressed enough, liberals? Well, I can help. The Supreme Court has decided to hear King v Burwell. This is just the latest in literally hundreds of lawsuits designed to cripple Obamacare by any means necessary. This one is based on a typo in the law that the plaintiffs claim means that people in states that did not set up their own healthcare exchanges do not get federal subsidies to help people pay for their insurance. If this case was reversed by the right wing extremists on the Court, it would be a catastrophe.

Of course, even now, in states that didn’t accept the Medicaid expansion, the working poor fall into a kind of “doughnut hole” where they don’t get free healthcare but also don’t qualify for any subsidies. This alone should have caused the voters to reject every Republican legislature in the nation. But of course, that didn’t happen. Even Sam “Screw the kids, rich people need more cash!” Brownback managed to win re-election by four percentage points. What’s the matter with Kansas? It is filled with the apathetic and the evil. Good job guys! At least those awful working poor won’t get healthcare so they can continue to function at their back-breaking jobs!

King v Burwell would do the same thing that is currently happening to the working poor to the entire middle class. And you, my dear liberal reader, are probably now thinking, “Well, then the Republicans would have to get on board; they can’t slight the middle class!” Oh, grasshopper, how much you must learn! It won’t matter. Sam Brownback and Scott Walker and all the rest won’t be up for election for four years anyway. And by 2017, Walker may be in the White House — propelled to the high office by his bold stand destroying public sector unions. If your life can’t get better, at least you can feel good about other lives getting worse, am I right?!

Sadly, if the Supreme Court manages to do this to the country, it will not only harm red states. Oregon, for example, will be harmed, because its state exchange turned out to be a complete fiasco and they were forced to use the federal exchange. Of course, the idea of King v Burwell is not to hurt individual states. The idea is to destroy the law in total. If 21 states in the union are not given the benefits of the law, there will be a huge call for its repeal.

That’s why the red states will not accept the fact that they are not representing the best interests of their people. This will be a great opportunity to demagogue the issue, “It is outrageous that the people are forced to pay higher taxes and yet they get nothing for it!” It will not matter that (1) they won’t in general be paying higher taxes and (2) the only reason they get nothing for it is because their leaders refuse to accept it. American politics doesn’t do fact or nuance. And the Republican Party is the perfect organization for this kind of environment.

Nicholas Bagley is very pessimistic about this, The Supreme Court will hear King. That’s bad news for the ACA. His argument is that it takes four justices to hear a case. And in general, they will only decide to take a case if they think it will go in their favor. Those who are inclined to agree with the lower courts’ decisions have no real reason to hear the case. So there is a very good chance the usual five suspects will hear the case and throw a major wrench into the workings of the rest of government.

My gut reaction is to think that they won’t do this. After all, John Roberts seems to be concerned about his legacy, even if the others aren’t. What’s more, he already took a hit when he found in favor of Obamacare before. But my gut reaction could well be wrong. I don’t think that Roberts — or for that matter any of the justices — is that rational. In fact, he may use his previous vote to self-justify that he is the truly objective justice and now he is just “calling balls and strikes.”

I weep for the once great country of my birth. This is how empires crumble.

Update (7 November 2014 6:10 pm)

If you aren’t as familiar with King v Burwell, Jonathan Chait has a pretty good overview of it, Supreme Court to Hear Newest, Craziest Legal Challenge to Obamacare. He’s far more positive about sanity prevailing. He may be right. I just wouldn’t count on it.

As you probably know, I am an amateur political scientist. I don’t mean this in terms of all the ranting I do here — fine though the ranting may be. I mean that I have created my own little election models and I have developed a couple of theories that professional political scientists would scoff at. And one of the most vexing things that I’ve noticed is that what’s going on in the economy is of fundamental importance to which party wins in presidential elections, but it seems to have absolutely no effect at all in mid-term years. I understand why it is important in presidential elections: the economy is of primary importance to people. It makes no sense that it wouldn’t matter in off-year elections.

Look at this year. the unemployment rate started at 6.6% in January and it was down to 5.8% last month. You don’t believe this number because of the discouraged worker effect? Fine! The Civilian Employment-Population Ratio was 58.2% in January and it is 59.2% now — a remarkable increase in just one year. Or let’s look at the number of jobs added to the economy this year: we’ve added an average (pdf) of over 220,000 jobs per month this year. That’s better than last year when we didn’t even manage 200,000 jobs per month.

The the economy is really doing better. If this had been a presidential election year, the party in the White House (nominally the Democrats) would have won by a landslide. Yet they did not. The Democrats lost in a landslide. How can this be?! Is it as simple as Matt Yglesias says, “Life isn’t fair.” Well, no; it isn’t as simple as that, because what happened this year is exactly what happened in 2010 when the economy had flatlined. Yet the people still punished the party that was in the White House.

It’s important — even critical — to remember that the president shouldn’t get credit for the economy. Most of what Obama has done has been bad for the economy. The Fiscal Cliff deal was probably worth doing, but the timing was bad and it harmed the economy in the short term. A better thing to have done would have been to trade two more years of the low top tax rates for a continuation of the payroll tax holiday. But more important, Obama allowed himself to be blindsided with the Debt Ceiling, which led to the Sequester. That’s been an enormous drag on the economy. Yet, as always, economies do heal and that is what we are seeing.

But given that the voters punish presidents for bad economic trends and reward them for good economic trends, why don’t they do this during off-year elections? Why do they ignore the economy when he isn’t running? And note: Obama’s approval rating is eleven points under water, even though times are fairly good and they are getting better.

I think this is all about perceptions of un-engaged voters. People think that who is president really does matter. But almost half don’t think it matters who controls Congress. Other polls have shown that a large percentage of the nation don’t even know which party controls Congress. These are the people who reward the party in the White House for good economic trends. And these people simply don’t show up for mid-term elections because they don’t think the elections matter.

So we come back, once again, to turnout. And this speaks incredibly poorly of our democracy. This isn’t even a partisan issue. Whether politicians deserve it or not, the voters don’t reward or punish them on the state of the nation when it isn’t a presidential election. Many pundits wonder why the Republicans are so extreme and unwilling to change to appeal to the people. But why should they?! They know that their political destinies are rarely linked to what the people what.

The real question is what the Democratic Party is going to do. How can the electorate be made to vote based upon the state of things? But maybe the Democratic power elite don’t want that. After all, their economic policies are pretty much the same as the Republicans’. Maybe the last thing they want is for the people to start rewarding actual liberal economic policy. That would hurt all their billionaire friends. But that just brings me back to the point I made yesterday, We Must Make the Democratic Party Better. We the people need to control the party, and that means getting money out of politics. Until we do, we are destined to oscillate from Democrat to Republican as the country slowly loses even the pretense of democracy.

I’m afraid that we liberals are upset about Tuesday’s election because we have had our expectations lowered far too much. The sad truth of modern America is that on economic issues, there is a razor thin difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. Are we really upset that Mark Pryor did not get elected? It’s not like he really worked for the people of Arkansas, even if he was far better than Tom Cotton. The Democrats and the Republicans are both the parties of big business. And they have been since the mid-1970s. As a result, many young people probably don’t even know what real liberalism looks like. If the Reagan of 1980 ran today, he would make many Democrats look like conservatives. And don’t get me started on Richard “I created the EPA” Nixon.

Jeffrey Sachs wrote an excellent article about this over at Huffington Post this morning, Understanding and Overcoming America’s Plutocracy. He noted, “History shows the wreckage of democracies killed from within.” And I’m not sure if we are seeing democracy killed in the United States, or if we are simply viewing its rotting corpse. The beauty of the modern plutocracy is that it doesn’t look like a plutocracy. Sachs put it well:

I am very pragmatic about politics. That’s why I’m a Democrat. It is still the only party that considers evidence. The Republican Party has turned into a revolutionary group where ideological purity is all that matters. What’s interesting is that most Americans share my pragmatism. But most Americans don’t vote. And Democrats normally only offer one reason to vote for them, “We’re not (quite) as bad as the Republicans!”

But even among those who do vote, we saw the minimum wage win in a big way on Tuesday. In four red states — Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota — where the people voted for very conservative candidates, they voted to increase the minimum wage. Think about that for a moment. These people are voting for candidates who are generally against having any minimum wage at all, yet they voted to increase theirs. How does that happen?

I don’t think it is cognitive dissonance. I think it is quite rational. Democrats have started to talk about raising the minimum wage. But they are only recently to the issue. Certainly when Congress was owned by the Democrats, they did not think it was important enough an issue. In fact, I think it is fair to say that the Democratic Party has approached the minimum wage the same way it approached same sex marriage: as a follower. As always, the usual caveat: much better the Democratic Party that follows public opinion than the Republican Party that fights against it. But I suspect that the voters of Arkansas figured that it didn’t matter that Tom Cotton voted against raising the minimum wage in the past; neither Cotton nor Pryor were actually going to do anything about it in Congress.

Yesterday, Jonathan Bernstein wrote a disheartening article, Win the White House, Lose the Midterms. It is about how people blame the president for everything. So when the Democrats have a situation like they had in 2009, they need to use it. The problem is that we elect terrible Democrats whose first loyalty is to big business. That’s why single payer healthcare was never seriously considered. Bank nationalization was never seriously considered. No truly liberal policy was considered when the Democrats had the White House, House of Representatives, and a super-majority in the Senate. We were offered the same old neoliberal policies — the usual “not as bad as what the Republicans want” policies. Although sadly, what Obama got behind in policy terms was actually more conservative than what John McCain had run on. Think about that.

Sachs made a really upsetting observation:

The solution? I think we have to start with a grander vision. The neoliberalism of the the Clinton and Obama administrations have been a catastrophe for liberalism. After that, it is just a lot of work at the local level. The most important thing is to get money out of politics. But that is a very heavy lift since the Supreme Court decided that money doesn’t distort the political process — a decision that started with the conclusion. But we can succeed. It is just that it is all on us. Sachs noted that we have pushed back against plutocracy before: “notably in the Progressive Era from 1890-1914, the New Deal from 1933-1940, and the Great Society from 1961-1969.” But that it wasn’t done by Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and Kennedy/Johnson, “[I]n all of those cases, the mass public led and the great leaders followed the cause.” We have to start leading.

Afterword

This video is self-congratulatory — not that I mind. But I do think that Wolf-PAC is a good group and they are worth supporting.

Nationwide, yesterday was a terrible election. But here in California, it wasn’t so bad. And here in Sonoma County, it was actually quite good. To give you some idea, Jerry Brown won the state with 59-41% — without campaigning. But here in Sonoma, Brown won 74-26%. But you know Sonoma county: it’s where hippies go to retire. Similarly, my man Tom Torlakson eked out a victory with 52% statewide, but won handily here with 65%.

This isn’t to say it all went well. Corporate tool James Gore beat Deb Fudge decisively for County Supervisor. Of course, I’m sure that if this were a partisan race, both Gore and Fudge would be Democrats. That’s part of the problem with the Democratic Party: it is such a big tent that it doesn’t much stand for anything. Although it indicates a bigger problem with the Republican Party: why would anyone be a member of that narrow and extreme party?

The statewide propositions went exactly as I predicted. Everything passed except for the three measures that had multi-million dollar ad campaigns against them. The Indian casino measure went down. The existing medical tort levels stay in effect because rich doctors and hospitals convinced the people that it would make their healthcare go up to benefit the “trial lawyers.” And we won’t see our healthcare go down in price because that would be giving power to a “bureaucrat.” I tell you, I weep for democracy. I see this all the time on the state level where carpet advertising totally distorts the democratic process.

We had a couple of local bond measures that I’m pleased to see pass. Measure H will help to improve infrastructure at Santa Rosa Junior College. Measure M will help to improve infrastructure and lengthen hours at the Sonoma County Library.

I understand that most people do not live in California, much less Sonoma County. And I feel really bad for people in Mississippi and North Carolina. By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed, Philadelphia was the most vibrant city in the colonies because it had the most liberal governance. The same is true of California today. Sadly, too many people would rather vote to screw their follow man than vote to lift up everyone.

This morning, Jonathan Chait wrote, The Democrats Have Two Choices Now: Gridlock or Annihilation. In it, he provided a stark graph. It shows how big a percent of the vote was from people under 30, and in 2006, 2010, and 2014: it was always the same, 12%. Compare this to 2008 and 2012 when it was 18% and 19%. Meanwhile, people over 60 made up 32% of the vote in 2010 and 37% of the vote in 2014. Is it any question why we are losing?

Benjamin Franklin supposedly said that the United States was, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Too many Americans think our democratic republic is God given. But it isn’t. We have to fight for it. And we aren’t — at least not nationally.

9:49 pm — One final thing. As far as I can tell, there does look like there was an overall polling tilt of roughly 3%. It is just that it was in the Democrats’ favor. I’m sure there will be more on that tomorrow. But I’m hoping to write mostly about film tomorrow.

8:47 pm — Well, it looks like things are going down exactly as I predicted, except that the Democrats didn’t even manage to get North Carolina. Thom Tillis has beat Kay Hagan decisively. I don’t think you can call this a wave election, but the Republicans did perhaps a bit better than the fundamentals would indicate. So much for the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote campaign and the Bannock Street Project. I have to say, I am so sick of moderate Democrats telling me that I’m all wrong and the party’s constant move to the right is absolutely the correct thing to do. I don’t see how Democrats could do any worse with actual liberals. The ultimate Democratic candidate is now Charlie Crist: a former Republican with absolutely no charisma. That’s the modern Democratic Party! I’ve even got a slogan, “Not as evil as the Republicans! And not as interesting either!” Go team.

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Jonathan Cohn made an excellent point over at New Republic yesterday, Why Passing Legislation Might Not Solve the GOP’s Image Problem. There has been much talk about how if the Republicans control both chambers of Congress, they will be in a position to pass all kinds of legislation. As Mitt Romney recently said on Fox News about how Obama will be forced to veto bills, “I think at that point, we’ll find out who really is the party of no.” Cohn mentions three reasons why this isn’t likely to be the case.

First, the laws that the Republican Congress passes will almost certainly be unpopular. There is, as always, talk about immigration reform. But the Senate already passed a bill with a 13 year pathway to citizenship. This couldn’t even get a vote in the House. The Republicans there changed the bill so that the pathway was 18 years, I think. Yet even that was not acceptable. The truth is that any immigration “reform” that the Republicans pass will be something that does nothing but offend Latinos. And as I’ve discussed before, the Republican plan for immigration reform was always that it would be, “This one thing we are doing for you people!” That is not very useful in a rebranding campaign.

Other than this, I see the Republicans amending Obamacare to remove the medical device tax. I’ve heard a number of Republican politicians claim that the American people want this. The fact is the American people don’t even know that the tax exists. But I can well see the reaction of the Republican base to this bill, “You mean that’s the difference between freedom and tyranny?!” If the American people had an attention span longer than that of a gnat, all we would need to do to get them to vote for Democrats is to allow the Republicans to govern for a couple of months.

Cohn’s second reason why the Republican Congress isn’t likely to improve its brand is that the Senate Republicans are not going to stop saying “No!” to President Obama’s executive and judicial nominations. This is something I hadn’t thought about. There is zero chance that Republicans are going to be more reasonable about nominations simply because they have more power. There is a decades long trend that shows that Republicans in the Senate maximize whatever power they have. So don’t expect to see them move an inch in the direction of reasonableness.

But the biggest reason in Cohn’s opinion is that very soon the 2016 primary will start and the Republicans trying to become president will drown out everything else. And what will they be doing? Exactly what they did last time. They will be battling it out to see who is the most conservative. One will offer, “I think we should build a 50 foot wall on the border with Mexico!” And another will counter, “I guess you don’t care about illegals bringing Ebola into the country. If you did, you would support my idea to nuke Mexico so that the border is a radioactive wasteland where nothing can live!” And so on.

I think the real reason that Republicans will not be able to rebrand themselves is because they have no ideas other than “Tax cuts!” and “Drill, baby, drill!” This goes back to Cohn’s first point that the bills they will pass will be unpopular. I discussed this yesterday, The People Don’t Care About Gridlock. People want Washington to get things done in theory. But in practice, they would rather Washington not get things done than get things done that they don’t like.

So will the Republicans manage to pass a personhood bill? Very possibly. They might be able to pass Romney’s millionaire’s tax cut. They might be able to pass legislation that will take healthcare away from millions. But all of these will just reinforce the common (and correct) perception of Republicans: they can’t get much done and what they can get done is bad.

Let’s talk about helicopter money. The idea here is that the Federal Reserve could print bank notes (let’s just call it money for clarity’s sake) and drop it out of helicopters where people could pick it up and spend it, thus stimulating the economy. It sounds like a crazy idea. But in our current economic environment, it would not lead to inflation. It would simply put unused workers and resources into service. On the other hand, if the economy were already working at full capacity, throwing money out of helicopters would create inflation.

I don’t pretend to understand money. I think it is a deeply mysterious thing. Economists would generally agree with that. It does have a large psychological component to it where money is worth what we all delude ourselves into thinking it means. The only thing that really ties it down is that we can pay our taxes with it. And that is a big deal. But it still leaves the value of money in a largely mythical land of shared delusion.

The reason I’ve brought this up is because over the weekend, Simon Wren-Lewis wrote, Fighting the Last War. The title is a reference to the old adage that generals are always fighting the last war. His point is not a new one. The truth is that much of the economics profession has never gotten over the success of explaining stagflation. This led to people jettisoning Keynesian theory as though it didn’t even have relevance to situations like the Great Depression, which it was mostly a reaction to.

What’s interesting about this is that it shows that economics really isn’t a science. In physics, both relativity theory and quantum mechanics reduce to Newtonian mechanics for normal (slow, macro-scale) motion. The embrace of Friedman and company and the rejection of Keynes just shows that economics acts more like ideology than science. How is it that rational expectations models don’t reduce to Keynesian models when applied to depressed economies? If I were an economist, I’d be ashamed.

But the practical question is how can economists and policy makers continue to hold onto their doctrines that worked for stagflation but not for depressions (or “secular stagnation” if you prefer). And I think the answer is now as always that it is all about ideology. In general, economists don’t like the government. Even pretty liberal people like Paul Krugman believe in a fairly limited role of government in the economy. So you end up with a situation where the most liberal economists are for fiscal stimulus, the moderates believe in monetary stimulus, and the conservatives think that even monetary policy is dangerous.

Note how skewed that is. The liberal economists are where the general public is. So we end up with a government where only monetary policy is acceptable — and even it not very much. Wren-Lewis suggests that the reason that we are stuck with this way of thinking is that we have the narrative of stagflation all wrong. It didn’t come from government profligacy but rather economic shocks. But I would counter that and say that it is looking for a rational explanation for irrational behavior.

Remember that Greg Mankiw was for government stimulus under Bush the Younger. Then, when Obama proposed it, he was against it. And then, after he became a consultant for Romney and it looked like Romney might be the next president, Mankiw again changed and was much more open to stimulus. There is no doubt that Mankiw is a brilliant economist. But he isn’t just looking at the facts. In fact, I would say he is never looking at the fact and moving forward. He makes a decision and works the facts backward.

Milton Friedman didn’t really revolutionize economic thinking. He was just an especially talented propagandist for a libertarian world view. That’s what he added to economics: a binding conclusion on economic thinking. But that makes Friedman like Roland Barthes and economics like postmodern analysis. And that’s fine! I think Barthes was brilliant. But no one ever made government policy based upon his analysis of soap detergent advertisements.