Indirectly through Jonathan Bernstein, I came upon a jaw dropping article by Jeffrey Lord in The American Spectator, 2014: a Wave Election or an Earthquake? The article goes into some detail describing what the difference is between a “wave” election and an “earthquake” election. It doesn’t help that he seems to have made up the term “earthquake election.” But according to him, a wave election is when one party does really well but it is ephemeral. An earthquake election is where one party does really well and it represents a long lasting political realignment.

The problem with the article is the subtext. This conservative hack is certain that the Republicans will win big in November. Never mind that polls indicate that the Democrats just look stronger and stronger in the Senate and have always looked good in the governorship races. Lord just knows this is a big year for the Republicans.

He also doesn’t actually get the idea of a wave election right. Both 2008 and 2010 were wave elections because the prevailing political tide dragged along a lot of candidates who wouldn’t normally have been elected. Even if the Republicans do really well this year, it won’t be a wave. In the Senate, we are seeing the results of the Democrats’ 2008 wave. There are a lot of Democratic Senators up for re-election in states that are generally pretty hostile to Democrats. The fact that only one of the six main Senate election models give the Republicans an even modest advantage (Just 4 percentage points!) shows this is no kind of wave.

But Lord has a major ax to grind. He claims that the Republicans made major gains in 1994 because Clinton turned to the left. He also claims Carter (the proto-New Democrat who was really quite conservative) lost to Reagan because he was liberal and not because of the bad economy and the Iran hostage crisis. Clearly, Lord is one of the true believers who thinks that if only the Republicans ran the Platonic ideal of the pure conservative, they would win elections for the next century.

Similarly, he complains (This is unbelievable!) that Thad Cochran isn’t a real conservative because he voted to affirm Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. He likens Ginsburg to Robert Bork. So okay, Jeffrey Lord is not just a conservative hack, he’s also an ignoramus. But he is entirely typical of the whole of the Republican Party. What we hear from him today goes right along with what we heard everywhere in 2012 about Mitt Romney winning the presidency. Remember Peggy Noonan’s belief that Romney was going to win because she was seeing more yard signs? That’s what’s going on here.

In Lord’s defense, he does write, “The GOP establishment panicking over re-electing Pat Roberts in red state Kansas is not a sign of an earthquake election — and maybe not even a wave election.” There are 33 Senate seats up for election this year. Of them, 21 are currently held by Democrats. The Republicans should easily be able to take the Senate. But there is a very good chance that they won’t even be able to do that. Regardless of what happens, 2014 will not be a wave election.

But if the economy keeps improving, 2016 will be a wave election. For the Democrats. And it might even be an earthquake.

Yesterday, over at FiveThirtyEight, David Wasserman wrote, After The Midterms, The Diversity Gap in the House Will Be Wider Than Ever. The numbers are stark. In fact, it would not at all be incorrect to call the Republicans the White Man’s Party. I do a lot of work for a black Baptist church and it has a far larger white constituency than the Republican Party has women or minority groups.

The United States is 31% white male. But the Republicans in the House of Representatives are 89% white male. And the trend is in the wrong direction. It was only 86% before the 2012 election. And since then, it has gotten worse still. There have been six special elections when Republicans won and every one of them was a white male.

Compare this to the Democrats. After the 2012 election, of the 201 Democrats in the House, there were “61 women, 43 African-Americans and six LGBT members.” The Republicans have no openly gay members of the House. But to be fair, the Republican Party has always been a big supporter of self-hating closeted gay politicians. Oh, and in the two special elections since 2012, the Democrats have picked up two more women.

What this all makes me think of is William Buckley statement, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop…” This is the basis of the Republican Party. Forget “freedom” and “responsibility.” This is all about the fact that white men have traditionally had ultimate power in this country. And they are afraid they are losing it. This is why they vilify the poor, because it is a way of arguing that white men deserve to be rich because they are better. The poor are over-represented by minority groups. This includes the LGBT community, who are poorer than their straight counterparts.

So a conservative really is someone who stands athwart equal opportunity, yelling stop! Worse than that. He doesn’t just yell stop. He uses the privilege that he has from centuries of repressing other groups to distort the system so that those who have been repressed continue to be repressed. At the same time, he yells, “It’s their own fault!” And he works the system he mostly controls to make sure that when he screws up, the government is there to bail him out. At the same time, he yells, “Food stamps are welfare that must be stopped!” And he congratulates himself on all his philanthropy, that mostly involves being a Job Creator™. At the same time, he yells, “If only there were no minimum wage, I’d hire more 8-year-olds to work in my business.”

Well America, what’s it gonna be? Are you going to continue to vote for politicians who not only don’t look like you, they don’t look after you? You might think that the country is badly in need of change. But these rich white Republicans don’t agree. They stand athwart your attempt to improve your life and yell, stop! And they have an army of lawyers, cops, and PR men to enforce their demand.

As regular readers know, I hate football. I think it is the most boring game ever invented. The primary focus of the game is very big men running into each other. It has very little of the raw athletic beauty of basketball (which I also find tiresome) or the technical grace of baseball (which I must admit to having a great fondness for). But the recent NFL scandals really have gotten my attention and they’ve made me really angry. But I’m not angry in the way you may assume.

I just do not care. Why is anyone surprised that a bunch of steroid cases playing a game that is modeled on old-style symmetric warfare would produce a bunch of violent men? The game itself appeals to the worst instincts in men. It is one big orgy of testosterone. While the rich have made a fetish of greed, the rest of our society has made a fetish of violence.

What angers me is that this is not the problem of the NFL. This is the problem of the people who watch the NFL. The NFL is approaching the problem the same way that any business would. The new domestic abuse guidelines are a farce, meant to tell the nation that everything’s okay; they have it handled. They take domestic abuse seriously! Of course, they don’t. They take the bad PR of domestic abuse seriously. I’m sure they realize that for a lot of viewers, the fact that players act like animals off the field as well as on only makes the game more exciting. It makes it more real. This is not professional wrestling!

The whole thing reminds me of racism in America. We are a deeply racist country, but we spend most of our time pretending that we aren’t. And then, when some comedian uses the n-word, everyone is outraged. I maintain that this outrage has nothing to do with the word. The outrage is about the fact that someone screwed up and made us admit that, yes, there is racism. But using the n-word is one of the most benign forms of racism. I don’t think Michael Richards was necessarily any more racist than I am. It’s our hidden assumptions about different people that most harm society.

Similarly, with the NFL we glorify violence. But as a society we pretend that it doesn’t mean anything else. It is compartmentalized. The billions we pay to owners and the millions we pay to players of this violent game are not supposed to be about anything but the game — it isn’t about violence! But obviously, the people who play this game well are going to be more testosterone fueled and more violent than the average person. In the eight years that Roger Goodell has been head of the NFL, there have been 56 domestic abuse allegations — that’s seven per year. And I’m sure that is just a small percentage of what’s really going on.

I admit it: I don’t like football. I’d love for it to go away so that people could spend their time in more edifying ways. But I don’t see how anyone can watch the NFL and not acknowledge that an automatic part of that is that women and children will be brutalized off the field. And it isn’t just the players who are doing the violence. Five years ago, a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that watching football increased domestic violence. According to an article on it in Slate, “Based on domestic violence police reports from the years 1995-2006, the report finds that when an NFL game ends in an upset, the home state of the losing team experiences a sudden, brief uptick in domestic violence.”

So enjoy your football games. I really don’t mind. But don’t pretend that the associated domestic violence is about bad apples or a cultural problem. Domestic and other forms of violence are fundamental to the game of football.

Yesterday, Thomas Frank wrote his weekly column, All These Effing Geniuses: Ezra Klein, Expert-Driven Journalism, and the Phony Washington Consensus. This morning, Jonathan Chait wrote another “Thomas Frank is an idiot” article, Have Nerds Betrayed the Left? And then Jonathan Bernstein went after him, Democratic Party Wasn’t Always Liberal. And finally, Ed Kilgore spent some time punching the hippie, No, Tom Frank, NAFTA Did Not Create the Christian Right.[1] After writing my generally positive take on Frank’s article, The Dangers of Experts in Politics, I feel the need to defend him.

What really struck me about each criticism was that the writers focused on details while just assuming that his conclusion was silly. Kilgore goes so far as to assume things that Frank did not write. He didn’t even mention NAFTA. Having read Frank for many years, it seems he is talking about the entirety of the New Democratic economic platform. Regardless, Frank’s overall argument is that after the economic conservatism of the 1980s and early 1990s, the people were ready for economic liberalism. And they didn’t get it.

A commenter on my article, Colin Keesee, noted:

Exactly! On social issues, the two parties really do provide a choice. And social conservatism is more popular. Balance that with the extreme conservative economic policies of the Republicans and the slightly less extreme conservative economic policies of the Democrats and there really is no choice. The economy is going to suck for the poor regardless of the party, so they might as well go along with the party that flatters their cultural prejudices.

I don’t think Frank is arguing that all a Democratic politician has to do is embrace economic populism and he will be elected. The entire Democratic brand has been soiled for a large part of the electorate. This is a nationwide problem. But if the cultural conservatives noticed that the Democratic Party was actually pushing policy that helped them economically, the brand would change. I’m with Frank that the current choice for such voters is social and economic conservatism (Republicans) and social liberalism and economic conservatism (Democrats). By voting Republican, they at least get half of what they want; voting Democratic, they get nothing.

Now I probably disagree with Frank in that I think the social liberalism gets in the way of reaching out to these voters. Any single Democrat running in a red district would need to repudiate his social liberalism. Rhetorically, he would need to start sounding like Rick Santorum, who has always had very good economic rhetoric (although there is no doubt if he were ever elected, he’d be economically conservative). But Frank is looking at the broader issue — the long view. The problem with the Democrats is that they spend too much time making compromises for the sake of the next election, while the Republicans succeed in pushing the whole field of debate to the right. And what that means is that the Republicans win even when they lose.

It bothers me that Chait, Bernstein, and Kilgore are so closed to the broader argument. Frank is concerned that the Democratic Party is so conservative on economic policy. The question is why Chait, Bernstein, and Kilgore are not.

[1] I hate that people call Thomas Frank “Tom.” I’ve always taken it as a kind of boast, “I know him so I call him by his nickname.” But in the article, Kilgore notes that he has only met Frank once. So it isn’t even that. Regardless, I find it confusing. I know who “Thomas Frank” is immediately. When people use “Tom Frank,” it confuses me and takes a moment for me to figure out who they are talking about. I wish they would stop doing that.

Paul Krugman wrote a curious column today, How to Get It Wrong. He looked at the financial crisis and asked how it is the economics profession got the response so wrong. Of course, he noted that it isn’t “economics” itself that got it wrong. Anyone with a basic understand of economics could predict what happened. But there were certain notable economists who got things fatally wrong. And how exactly does that work?

I think I can explain a big part of it. It’s the money, stupid! Glenn Hubbard was paid $1,200 per hour by Countrywide Financial to sign off on their toxic mortgages. There is gobs of money to be had by working as an apologist for the wealthy. And in the economics and financial fields, people are well aware of the kind of money that is available. Some Latin scholar has no such temptations. There aren’t man walking around college campuses with buckets of money for the scholars who have the right marginal theory about Cicero’s oeuvre.

This isn’t to say that Hubbard is a charlatan. I don’t think it works that way. What happens instead is that bankers and other promoters of “free” markets notice that the young Hubbard naturally has opinions that go along with what they are selling. So they give him money for his research. And they give him money to speak to groups of like minded plutocrats. And before long, without any intent to deceive, Glenn Hubbard dives into a collection of toxic assets and just doesn’t see anything wrong.

The problem, of course, is not Glenn Hubbard or Alberto Alesina or Reinhart and Rogoff. The problem is the politicians. Krugman discussed this. Let’s suppose these self-serving academics had not been around to provide intellectual cover for bad economic policy:

The answer, of course, is that the politicians would have done exactly the same thing. Politicians don’t need economists to back them up. Remember Obama at the very beginning of his presidency, “All across America, families are tightening their belts and making hard choices. Now, Washington must show that same sense of responsibility.” That wasn’t based on any economic theory. When Alesina made that argument, it was circuitous. Obama was making it because it is the kind of “common sense” that just happens to be totally wrong. What he was saying was, “All across America, families are tightening their belts and making hard choices. Now, Washington must do the same thing so that American families have even less money and must tighten their belts even more and make even harder choices.”

So Krugman is right that the problem is not with the economics profession. It has a lot of good advice to offer to policy makers. But all that good advice was ignored. It didn’t tell politicians what they wanted to hear. It didn’t justify Obama’s slick rhetoric that we knew was wrong in the 1930s. And if there hadn’t been very smart cranks like Alberto Alesina around to justify what the politicians were going to do regardless, they would have gone it alone.

Think about evolutionary theory. There are no reputable scientists who question it. But there are tons of people who pretend it is bunk just because they want to believe something else. The same is true of global warming. It really doesn’t matter. If an issue becomes political, people will find a way to ignore it. And any problems within an academic discipline are dwarfed by the vested interests outside it who want to make a buck today and don’t care about the people, planet, or even the long-term health of the economy.

Friday brought some good news, “Six Californias” Plan Falls Short of Making November 2016 Ballot. It seems that Tim Draper’s plan to get it on the ballot failed because too many of his paid-for signatures were bunk.

I’m not against breaking up California. For one thing, I don’t like the anti-democratic Senate and the fact that California has the same representation in that chamber as Wyoming does. Also, the state really represents two groups of people: northerners and southerners. Just the same, the northerners share a common culture with Oregon and Washington, but no one is talking about combining them into a single state. And as former California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez said, “Six Californias was a solution in search of a problem that didn’t address any of our state’s challenges.”

The question one has to ask is why Draper was so keen on breaking up the state. The answer can be seen in the map above. See the yellow section there in the middle? That’s “Silicon Valley.” Draper wanted to set up his own little state where he would face no regulations (other than the ones the federal government forced on him) and no state taxes. Draper is, in other words, a typical billionaire who, now that he has a whole bunch of toys wants to take them and go home.

So I’m glad that he wasted millions of dollars getting a bunch of bogus signatures. For one thing, it put a lot of money into the hands of poor people who desperately need it. But I also like that it shows that Draper can’t even manage a simple political operation. He is a good example of how being rich doesn’t show that you are smart. Of course, even though everyone talks about Draper as a “venture capitalist,” that’s not really true. He made his money the old fashioned way: he inherited it!

But never fear: Six Californias isn’t dead. It just won’t be on the 2016 ballot. He reportedly spent $5 million on this failed campaign. That’s only a half percent of his estimated one billion dollar net worth. And it is a small price to pay for his ultimate goal of lowering his taxes. And that’s all this is about. For the rich, that seem to always be what everything is about.

Matt Bruenig wrote a funny article over at his blog, Capitalism Whack-A-Mole. It is about the shifting justifications for laissez-faire capitalism. When you whack one conservative apologia for capitalism down, up pops another: it is an endless game of whack-a-mole. This is nothing knew, of course. As Bruenig noted in his conclusion, “Most people come to their feverish support of capitalism through unreflective cultural mechanisms first, and their arguments are then filled in later.” In other words, they support the “free” market because they perceive it to be in their own personal interests. This is why libertarianism is almost exclusively the ideology of young guys with good prospects and old guys with piles of cash.

In the article, Bruenig noted that the different justifications are incompatible with each other. Supporters start with the “desert” argument, which says that people should have a right to rewards of their work. When they are countered with the fact that one-third of the economy is based upon rents (people charging for things they own), the supporters shift to the “voluntarism” argument. This holds that this ownership came about through voluntary transactions. When they are countered with the fact that private property itself is coercive because it requires laws to stop people from, for example, just farming fallow lands that someone else owns, the supporters shift to the “utility” argument. This is the old Milton Friedman argument that capitalism makes everyone richer. And when this is shown to be completely false (see, for example: the last four decades), they go back to the first argument: people have a right to rewards of their work.

I suspect I hang out with less sophisticated group of libertarians than Bruenig does. Just the same, the ones I talk to seem to be much more common. They normally start their arguments with the utility claim: in the libertarian utopia, everyone will be rich! Well, it is usually more along the lines of, “The minimum wage kills jobs.” Or, “Raising taxes hurts economic growth.” Such claims are easy to dispatch. So our libertarian warrior runs for cover in some form of first principle argument that the government has no right to interfere with private contracts. (Note: I am making the best case for the libertarians here; most don’t even get this sophisticated.)

The critical problem that they never manage to deal with is the arbitrary nature of capitalism. It simply isn’t the case that everyone starts life with an equal chance of success. And this is true even if you don’t consider that some people are born with innate characteristics that will help or harm them in our society. So even if hundreds of years ago, some white guys bough Manhattan for $26 in a voluntary deal, what does that mean to a poor child born today? Or a rich child? We know that a smart and hard working poor child will generally do worse economically than a stupid and lazy rich child. So this isn’t a question of people getting to keep what they worked for. At best it is people getting to keep what other people who are now dead worked for.

So the political question is always about utility: does the system work for everyone? And we know that it doesn’t. This isn’t an argument for socialism or even an argument against capitalism. Any society is a combination of the two. But what we’ve seen over the last four decades is that productivity growth has become uncoupled from worker wages:

Graph via Productivity, Inequality, Poverty.

This is why conservative economic rhetoric always comes back to vague notions like “freedom.” Over the last forty years, starting in a small way with conservative southern Democrat Jimmy Carter and really taking off with “freedom” loving Ronald Reagan, our government has pushed more and more conservative economic policy. This has not increased economic growth — just look at the graph. But it has increased profits of those at the very top of the economic system. Clearly, this is not a debate we should even be having. Our government has moved far too much toward capitalism and we need a correction back toward socialism.

The problem we face is that the Democratic Party — the “liberal” party — is largely dominated by New Democrats who think that the best thing is to continue to enrich the rich at the expense of the rest. But I’m hopeful that Democratic voters are finally waking up and that our long national dark age is ending. Because the truth is that it has gotten bad enough that everyone can see the problem. And the happy conservative rhetoric of “freedom” sounds mighty thin today. It doesn’t matter how they massage their rhetoric. The moles are all dying.

H/T: Noah Smith

Thomas Frank is annoyed with Ezra Klein, All These Effing Geniuses: Ezra Klein, Expert-Driven Journalism, and the Phony Washington Consensus. In particular, he has a problem with a recent Klein article, How Political Science Conquered Washington. And I have to admit: Klein’s article is weak. There is much to say about structural factors that affect politics. But there are also major limits.

Frank’s problem is the way that number crunchers often use “hard data” to argue that this or that can’t be done. Frank brought up Nate Cohn’s recent article about how the Democrats can’t take the House back because of natural factors rather than gerrymandering. Cohn’s advice is extremely limited: move to the right or wait for demographic shifts. Frank rightly pointed out that this misses what has really gone on with the Democrats losing rural areas: their shift away from economic populism has allowed the Republicans to gin up cultural resentments to get people to vote for them.

The big problem here is that the banner of “science” has a tendency to shut down creative discussion. Cohn looked at the maps and like Estragon announced, “Nothing to be done.” But this is just status quo apologetics. It tends to push out any thoughts that might be bubbling up from real thinkers rather than number crunchers.

Let me give you an example of this that only I seem to have noticed. Political science has shown that at least since World War II, the party that wins the White House is primarily determined by the nation’s economic trend. But as a result of this, people who pay attention (at least on the left) are focused on nominating “safe” candidates who are not going to swamp the economic fundamentals. To me, this means that when elections like 1992 and 2008 come along, Democrats should nominate actual liberals instead of moderate and even conservative candidates like Clinton and Obama. But we don’t get this.

The reasons we don’t get this more radical thinking is that Ezra Klein’s supposed improvement of doing journalism based upon “experts” rather than politicians is no improvement at all. Basically, he’s traded in the politicians for the people the politicians were talking to. And this has the distinct downside of implying a kind of scientific rigor that just isn’t there. There are experts worth listening too. I read Paul Krugman every day. But in a normal world, I would often disagree with him. It is just because the right in this country is so crazy that we still have to fight for intellectual ground that everyone thought was settled forty years ago. But Krugman really is a major creative thinker. And as a result, he too is largely marginalized, even though widely read.

I think the problem is not so much that Washington loves experts. It is rather that there is a kind of affinity fraud going on. Why does Washington continue to listen to Dick Cheney? Because everyone “knows” that he’s a good guy. And he must be smart and knowledgeable. He was the Vice President! Or why do we still hold Bill Clinton in high esteem? He’s the guy that set the policy to allow the mortgage excesses that made the housing bubble so much worse than it normally would have been. But he must be worth talking to because, well, he’s the kind of guy who is worth talking to.

Of course, these aren’t academics. But there are always academics providing the intellectual support for the more public figures. Look at Greg Mankiw. This widely respected economist was for economic stimulus during the Bush administration. But once Obama was in office, he was against stimulus. And then, during Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, when it looked like Romney might be the next president, Mankiw softened his position, getting ready to be completely for it once a Republican was again in the White House.

If political science has revolutionized political journalism, it has been done by the likes of Nate Silver and Sam Wang. But the thing is: neither of them are political scientists. When the actual political scientists at The Monkey Cage put together an election model, it jumped around excessively. If the election turns out to give the Democrats the Senate, it is going to mean that forecasting models that did the best are the ones that paid the least attention to the political science.

Of course, Thomas Frank’s larger criticism is that the experts that Ezra Klein so loves are the ones who for decades have told the Democratic Party to move to the right on economic issues. And they’ve been wrong. The Republicans have done quite well doing exactly the opposite. It is hard not to conclude that the political scientists don’t know much more than anyone. They just have a patina of credibility that actually makes them more dangerous.

Having said all this, I think we can learn a lot from political scientists. But as Sam Wang has noted in election models, a lot of what political scientists think they know is really just noise. It’s important to know what is useful and what is not. But most of all, we shouldn’t forget that political science is fundamentally just history. And we should not use it to limit what we can do politically. That will just keep us moving on the same track that is destroying the middle class, impoverishing the poor, and enriching the rich.

Karl Sharro wrote a satirical piece at his blog yesterday, We Give the Scottish Independence Referendum the Middle East Expert Treatment. It is along the lines of, If It Happened There… But instead of reporting on domestic affairs the way we would report on them if they happened elsewhere, Sharro is reporting on the Scottish vote to leave the United Kingdom the same way American “experts” report on the Middle East.

I don’t follow events in the Middle East enough to fully appreciate the article. But it is impossible not to get the gist of it. For example, the common confusion in the west regarding the Shai and Sunni Muslims is lampooned with, “The sectarian dimension relates to the independence question in a very complicated way, so for the purpose of journalistic expediency it’s not inaccurate to say that Protestants favor the union while Catholics prefer independence. Or the other way around.” They’re all the same. Am I right?!

But I was most taken with the conclusion to Sharro’s article because it gets to the real problem with the way that anything happening in the Middle East seems to cause otherwise reasonable people to throw up their hands and say, “What else can we do? We must bomb!” What he writes here seems to sum up the full extent of our thinking regarding ISIS, although its ridiculousness is apparent when applied to Scotland:

This is exactly the logic that I was talking about yesterday in, Education Reform: Help Those Who Don’t Need It. As I put it, “So it’s the same old American idea: it is better to do something, regardless of how bad it may be, than to do nothing at all.” I didn’t think about it much at the time, but when Obama said that the executive branch had not determined a strategy for ISIS in Syria, it was widely mocked — most especially by conservatives. This goes along with the idea that it is better to make a bad decision quickly than a good decision slowly. Of course, it just so happens that a quick decision leads to what conservatives always want: military action.

When it comes to ISIS, it seems that there was an actual reason for some of the bombing: to protect the Kurdish territory. I could be wrong about that, but that was what was reported. And that doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do; but at least there was something like a clear objective. The rest of the bombing campaign seems to just be what Sharro was lampooning. We seem to be bombing because we don’t know what else to do. And because it is what we always do. And it is more important to be seen to be doing something than to actually be accomplishing anything. The tragic thing about this is that Obama seems to be doing it to pacify people here in the United States who are broadly of two kinds: ignorant people who have been frightened by the second kind of people who are demagogues.

I’m sure that lots of “bad guys” get killed. But I’m equally sure that at least as many civilians die for the sin of having been born Iraq. One thing is certain: the people of Iraq would be far better off if the United States had never invaded back in 2003. People suffered under Saddam Hussein, and then they suffered more as a result of our war, and then they suffered in the aftermath, and they suffer under ISIS, and now they are being bombed because, hey, we have to do something!

H/T: Zack Beauchamp