David Weigel is a smart commentator, but he really doesn’t get it when it comes to racism in the Republican Party. I wrote about this before, Dave Weigel’s Racist Apologetics. And I’ve written about it in a more general sense, Why My Father Watches Fox News. The fact that Republicans get behind people like Allen West and Herman Cain is because they are black men who ask nothing of the party. They are iconoclasts who are willing to pretend that racism is a thing of the past. A black conservative who was upfront about racism would be marginalized. Just look at Colin Powell, who probably couldn’t win a Republican primary in a single state of the union.

This seems to be a foreign concept to Weigel who wrote today, What Conservatives Mean When They Talk About “Race-Baiting” in Mississippi. He’s right in a certain way: Mississippi conservatives don’t hate all blacks, just the ones who make the slightest demands on their fantasy world where racism was abolished 9 April 1865. I really do mean to go back that far, because it is clear that the conservative movement now thinks the civil rights laws of the 1960s were a form of tyranny. That is, after all, what was behind John Roberts’ decision to gut the Voting Rights Act: to pretend that racism is that thing that used to occur in the United States.

If Mississippi conservatives were really concerned about fairness and not just stopping blacks from voting, they would have changed their voting system. Instead of requiring voter identification, they would have required partisan primaries. Instead, they did the opposite. And their most conservative voters then freaked out when the blacks who they had intended to stop from voting at all went ahead and voted for a Republican that they didn’t like. I’m sorry, but this is racism pure and simple.

This is how Weigel sums up the complaints of the Mississippi Republicans, “The ‘racist’ party is the one that wins black votes by promising largesse, and the colorblind party aims to win them by talking free markets and social values.” This in itself is a racist view of the situation. What, after all, was Medicare Part D, but a giveaway to a Republican coalition? What was the attempt to privatize Social Security, but a giveaway to a Republican coalition? What was the recent farm bill, but a giveaway to a Republican coalition and an attack on a Democratic coalition? The whole idea that it is just blacks who are won over by a party’s pandering is racist. And add to that, the idea that rich people vote for the Republican Party because of their embrace of “free markets (!) and social values,” and you have a frighteningly racist statement.

I don’t know how long Weigel can go on making excuses for the clearly racist attitudes on the party of conservatives. And what’s more, I don’t know why he does it. There is no indication that Weigel harbors any more racist attitudes than we all do. And he is certainly smart enough to know what he’s doing. Does he think that he needs to be the one to always be out in front making the best case for the Republican Party’s racist language and policies? Or does he have a real blind spot where he can’t see that even his best case apologia for conservative racism is itself racist.

Let me make it easy for Weigel. The Mississippi conservatives are complaining because they know there are not that many black makers, so it must have been all those black takers who won the election for Thad Cochran. That’s the blunt way of putting, “The ‘racist’ party is the one that wins black votes by promising largesse, and the colorblind party aims to win them by talking free markets and social values.” I really want to know if Weigel would still claim that the conservatives making that argument aren’t really racists.

You probably know the idea of “creative destruction.” Basically, it means that smart people come into a poorly performing company. They get rid of the dead wood—they fire people. Then the company’s prices go down so that consumers have money they can spend on other things, increasing demand elsewhere. Then the fired people and even more can be better employed doing something else. The idea is that it may be disruptive, but in the long run, everyone is better off.

I have always had a problem with this idea. The reason is that prices do not reflect costs. Let’s suppose that I manufacture chairs and they cost me $5 each to make. I’m not going to sell them for $10 because that’s a reasonable markup. If I can get people to pay $100 for them, I’ll sell them for that price. On the other hand, if people will only pay $2 for the chairs, I will sell my existing inventory at that price and discontinue the line. So the only way that costs matters to me is if I’m not making enough. Otherwise, if people want to pay a million bucks for my $5 chair, that’s just fine.

Those of you who know a little economics will say, “Yeah, but you aren’t the only person who makes chairs!” And this is right. In the perfect markets of Chicago School models, other producers will come in and beat down my price. We will go back and forth until we get a price that is some reflection of the cost of bring the product to market. But such truly free markets are almost nonexistent. Let’s look at the way things normally work.

There are a bunch of little drug stores and they employ a whole bunch of people. A Walmart comes into town and puts them all out of business for both good (Walmart really has perfected the supply chain) and bad (Walmart illegally suppresses unions and can provide lost leaders) reasons. So there is lots of disruption but consumers really do get better prices. But the extra savings in the community is not equal to the loss wages. So creative destruction creates profits for the already rich and destroys the incomes of the community.

I was thinking about this after reading a great interview at Truthout between Jason Hickel and Alnoor Ladha, Are Economic Growth and Social Justice Incompatible? I recommend reading the whole thing, because it discusses the way the economy actually works and not the myths that we are constantly told. Take this frightening bit of information from Hickel:

That’s right boys and girls. In the mind of my father’s generation, “capitalism” was the same as “democracy” and “freedom.” But the oligarchs want to create a new kind of system. Feudalism became capitalism, but it seems very much like we are headed to what I call neo-feudalism.

What’s most upsetting about all this is that it has always been a farce. There have never been “free” markets. The system has always been geared to maintain the status quo. On the whole, the rich are not rich because they are smarter or more knowledgeable or harder working. They are rich because they are rich. They are rich because their parents were rich or simply because they were lucky. Being brilliant brings many rewards, but great wealth is not usually one of them. Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds truly revolutionized computing, but it was the subgeniuses Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who became billionaires.

So unless we stand up and do something about it, we will end up not only serfs, but serfs who are beholden to mediocrities. Kind of like we are now, but worse.

Image taken from The Amendment Gazette, Feudalism Then and Now.

There’s been something on my mind from a month and a half ago, and I thought I would address it. I have, what I think is a very friendly relationship with The Q-Filmcast guys. But when they did an episode of Dr Strangelove, there was a little unpleasantness—both on their blog and on Twitter. I was unhappy that they simply avoided the political content of the film. And as is my way, I am not one to use the soft sell. I wrote, “It amazes me that any of you could miss the fact that the same radical right-wing John Birch Society has come back in a big way within the Tea Party.” That was specifically in reference to how the film lampoons water fluoridation as a communist conspiracy.

They wrote back that they wanted to stay away from politics and focus on character and so on. If that’s the case, I can only wonder why they picked the film. Really. If they decided to watch Birth of a Nation, would they focus on Lillian Gish’s acting and avoid its explicit racism and Klan apologia? I don’t think so. My point is not to put these fine guys down, but just to point out that politics is politics. It is no longer acceptable to publicly claim that the Klan was just created to protect the purity of southern white woman. But we are (sadly) still arguing about American empire. And even more pointedly we still have people like Brigadier General Jack Ripper (the Fluoridation guy who starts the nuclear war). All you have to do is listen to Lieutenant Colonel Allen West (retired).

So to take no position on these matters is very much to take a position. One can’t, for example, be agnostic on the issue of torture. Being agnostic is being for it. But what really bothered me about the whole interaction was that facile disregard of my position. And then there was this tweet, “I go to the cinema to get away from socialists, or at least escape the endless political nonsense that’s tearing us apart.” They go to the cinema to get away from socialists? Really?! Because all you have to do to get away from socialists in America is to step outside your house, visit almost any website, watch any television program, or talk to anyone. And then, after implicitly vilifying socialists as a kind of pox on society, they provide an appeal to understanding. Apparently, the political nonsense that’s tearing us apart is that there are socialists who disagree with them.

This, I’m afraid is what is behind the “can’t we all just get along” chorus. It is really just a sneaky way of saying, “Shut up and get lost!” But I would much rather get the latter treatment. As regular readers know, I talk to a lot of conservatives and I find there is a lot of crossover in our beliefs. At least, there is a lot of crossover until Fox News and hate radio start telling them what all good conservatives ought to think. But if someone doesn’t want to discuss politics, that’s fine. But don’t pretend that you’re above it when my opinions offend you. All it really means is that your opinions either go along with the perspective of the nightly news, or you only listen to news sources that reinforce your prejudices. (Actually, that’s the same.)

To give you an example of what I’m talking about, the same guys who complained about my political nonsense that was “tearing us apart” tweeted out this image for Independence Day:

And it went along with the text, “1st rule of America… No tyranny.” Now there is so much wrong here it makes me weep. I hate that it turns Washington into a guy in a Tareyton Cigarettes ad. I hate the depiction of the founding fathers as though they were toughs rather than the Enlightenment thinkers that they were. I hate that of all pictures to post on Independence Day, this is the one they chose. But most of all, I hate the caption. That’s the first rule of America? No tyranny? Well, I’m against tyranny, but the tyranny that the Declaration of Independence refers to is nothing compared to the tyranny that was suffered by the African slaves held by the white ruling elite. And the man pushing hardest against this English tyranny (John Adams) was eager to set up his own tyranny against the lower classes in the new country. And what about Gerald Horne’s contention that many of the delegates were not interested in tyranny but the thought that England was soon going to outlaw slavery in its colonies? But none of this matters. These are arguments that we could have.

But promoting a slogan like “First rule of America… No tyranny” shows that the filmcast guys do have a political ax to grind. If you had asked me what the first thing that the Declaration of Independence brings to mind, I would have said, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I just don’t see the 1765 Stamp Act as the definition of tyranny. But again, that’s an argument that we can have. But we can’t have it when people who clearly disagree with you pretend to be disinterested.

So does Dr Strangelove work today as an indictment of the Tea Party? Most certainly. Does it lampoon people who think that international relations are about how hard various leaders can beat their chests? You bet. And is it scornful of the idea that we live in anything like a tyranny today? Absolutely.

Afterword

The only founding father I have a great deal of respect for is Thomas Paine who has largely been written out of our history books, other than noting the importance of Common Sense. What is not widely known is that his 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice called for property and estate taxes to pay for old age pensions. Sound familiar? Sound like an idea that was almost a century and a half before its time? Sound like an idea that conservatives today want to destroy? (Actually, it would already be destroyed, it if weren’t funded by a ridiculously regressive payroll tax.) It has also been suggested that the reason Paine was pushed to the side by the big founding fathers was his abhorrence of slavery. It’s interesting that all the founding fathers in that picture were slave owners. What a joke political discourse has become in this country.

Jonathan Bernstein and Jonathan Chait have had a little fight. Bernstein started it by writing, Barack Obama Is a Generic Brand. Basically, all he’s saying is this, “[A]lmost everything about Obama’s presidency can be explained by saying he’s a Democratic president.” In other words, Obama has acted the way any Democratic president would have acted. Bernstein gives him credit for perhaps being a better manager and even (although I think it’s laughable) a better negotiator. But otherwise, he’s a Democratic president—full stop.

I would go further. I would say that Barack Obama is a generic New Democrat. His brilliant idea coming into office was that if he offered the Republicans policies that they claimed to support, they would support those policies. For example, Obama offered the Republicans the exact same healthcare law that John McCain campaigned on. But the Republicans were never going to allow a Democrat—a black Democrat—to usher in a new era of politics where the two parties worked together on things they could agree on. So I think the difference between a Hillary Clinton administration and an Obama administration is only that she wouldn’t have been so naive. In terms of policy, Bernstein is right: no difference.

But Chait begs to differ, How Barack Obama Saved the Obama Administration. He says that there are two issues on which Obama really stuck his neck out. The first is the EPA regulation of existing power plants. And as proof that this was a gutsy move that most Democratic presidents wouldn’t have done, he notes that some pundits said he wouldn’t do it. Well, the fact that Matt Yglesias laid out the fact that it could be done and then covered himself from being criticized for being naive by saying that Obama wouldn’t do it, doesn’t mean very much. I’m sure that what actually happened was that Obama asked his advisers, “What can we do about global warming?” They mentioned coal-fired power plants and he said yes. Unless Chait’s memory is getting a little weak, a lot of people have been talking about this for years.

The second issue was pushing forward with Obamacare after Ted Kennedy died and it looked like the whole thing was going to fall apart. This one is hilarious. Chait wrote, “In late August of 2009… Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel wanted to pull the plug on comprehensive reform, but Obama overruled them.” Oh my! The Republican who claims to be a Democrat Rahm Emanuel wanted to pull back and Obama overruled him?! Maybe Chait is right, but not in the way he thinks. Your average Democrat wouldn’t have allowed Rahm Emanuel anywhere near his inner circle. Remember: he’s the guy who said that we liberals were “fucking retarded.”

I think it is more likely that Obama pushed ahead with the ACA because by that time he had figured out what a less naive president would have known all along: even if he dropped the ACA and gone with some minor healthcare reform, the Republicans would have killed it too. It doesn’t matter how minor it was, just as with the ACA, there would have been not a single Republican in Congress willing to vote for it.

I have no problem with Obama. He’s about as good a president as we are likely to get as long as half the country doesn’t vote. But there is nothing especially great about him either. He’s certainly not bold. If it weren’t for Joe Biden shooting his mouth off, Obama still would be against same sex marriage. He is an entirely typical New Democrat. That’s what we got last time and that’s probably what we’ll get next time. And there’s nothing especially terrible about that. But don’t let’s think that Obama stands out in terms of his leadership.

Martin Longman brought my attention to the fact that, Opie and Anthony Are No More. Apparently, for almost twenty years, there has been this thing called, The Opie and Anthony Show. It’s one of those shock jock shows that young men of limited intelligence think is super keen. I don’t mean to paint with too broad a brush, but Howard Stern is generally considered the best there is and I find his show to only be of reasonable quality with many aspects that don’t much appeal to me. I figure that Opie and Anthony are on the lower end of the maturity scale, but I really don’t know.

Well, it seems this last week, Anthony Cumia was out in New York City trying to take some pictures. A black woman happened to be in one of his pictures. She objected, Cumia escalated the situation and before long things got totally out of hand. According to Cumia, the woman “punched” him several times, but without minimizing it, I suspect it was what I would call a hit or a slap. And when I’m out in public and I call a woman the n-word and the c-word, I don’t think I’m in much of a position to complain if she knees me in the groin. Apparently, then some black guys came to the defense of the woman. But he doesn’t claim that they touched him and Cumia never went to the police.

Instead, he did what any privileged white man would do: he went on Twitter to vent to his 162,000 followers. And vent he did. No one tweet is a total barn burner. He never uses the n-word (but his followers do), but he does use the c-word. He talks about “those people” and how he was attacked because he was white and how they are savages and it’s a jungle. But his whole interaction was with one black woman. And the black men who came to her defense, probably did it because all they heard was him yelling expletives at her. Regardless, as we know (though it isn’t always right), in an altercation, people will go to the defense of the woman.

But let’s assume that it was a group of ten blacks and Mr Cumia was unfairly wronged by them. And let’s assume that he didn’t go on Twitter and say a bunch of racist and misogynistic things. His takeaway from the incident is the fundamental racist problem in the United States. If the same thing had happened with a group of white people, Cumia would likely be just as mad. But he wouldn’t generalize about it. It wouldn’t be “those people” in the general sense; it would have been “those ten people” who abused him. Because in modern America, white isn’t a race. It’s just the default. All other races are defined by how they deviate from white.

Now I know that Cumia will say that he has nothing against blacks and women. And in fact, right now, his latest tweet [Since deleted. -FM] is of him smiling with his arm around a black man. That’s not it. That’s not how racism works in the “I make $3 million per year crowd.” The problem is thinking that if one person who we’ve arbitrarily placed in some “race” (an artificial construct, but a useful one) does something we like or don’t like, it must say something about the entire race.

My favorite example is a racist driver. A black guy cuts him off in traffic. The guy thinks, “That’s totally typical! That’s what blacks are always doing!” If a white guy does the same thing, he thinks, “What a jerk!” And that’s the end of it. But if a black guy does something nice like allow him to merge into heavy traffic, the guy thinks, “Well, that’s unusual.” Nothing changes, of course. The nice black guy is just the exception that proves the rule. That is racism in America: white people are individuals whose actions only reflect on them; black people are representatives of an entire class.

The terrible thing is that I doubt seriously that Cumia is any more racist than any of us. In my life, I fight gut reactions (good and bad) all the time. But I am at an advantage of understanding somewhat how it works. I don’t delude myself into thinking that just because I would never consciously treat a black man differently that I don’t suffer from racist impulses. I am afraid that it is unlikely that Cumia will ever understand this, especially since so many of his fans seem to be egging him on in the opposite direction.

[In checking the broken Twitter link, I noticed that Cumia now has over twice as many followers as he did at the time of this article. Racism is a good career move in America. -FM]

On Thursday, I wrote, Jobs Report Good News for Senate Elections. As if reading my mind, Jonathan Bernstein responded, Sunny Jobs Report Won’t Save Democrats. His argument is that if things go very badly for Obama in Ukraine, Iraq, and elsewhere, or the economy tanks, it will be very bad for the Democrats. But if none of these things happen it will not help the Democrats all that much. Fair enough, but I think he’s being too simplistic about it regardless.

Looking at the Senate, the very fact that the control of this chamber is pretty much a toss up is an indication that the lack bad international news and a rapidly improving economy are having an effect on the election. The Democrats are way overexposed. They ought to be looking at being decimated with only 43 seats come January. Instead, the most likely result will be that will have 48 or 49 seats.

But let’s look at the unemployment numbers for this year and the previous two mid-term elections. In 2006, the unemployment rate was going down by 0.03% per month. The 2010 number was 0.04%. And the number thus far this year is 0.12%. So while the economy was improving when Bush and Obama saw their parties lose big, it was not improving at a fast enough rate to stand out in an off-year election.

If the current trend continues with the employment, the rate could 5.5% by the time of the election. I’m not saying that would have a huge effect, only that it would have some positive effect. And even Bernstein accepts my overall argument. He wrote “there’s more downside risk than upside opportunity.” Well, yeah. We all know that. But Mark Begich might win in Alaska without any help at all from the economy. Mary Landrieu only needs a little help in Louisiana. No one is suggesting that if the economy adds 400,000 jobs each of the next four months that Matt Silverstein will be the new Senator from Oklahoma and the Senate will have a Democratic super-majority.

But Bernstein is right to note the downside risks. Things could go very poorly over the next few months. The Republicans in Congress have almost unlimited powers to harm the economy, but I think at this time they are likely to stay quiet, figuring they will sail into power if they do nothing. And I don’t see Obama doing anything too terrible in international affairs. The good economic news really is good news for the Democrats. But it’s not time to start partying.

It’s Independence Day! Hooray! It’s the day we got independence from England. Well, it’s the day we declared independence from England. Well, it was the day that the document was ratified. It isn’t even clear whether the official document was ready to be signed for another two weeks. And then it seems to have been mostly signed in August. Although there were a number of people who were there to ratify it who never signed it at all. And at that point, it had been almost a year and a half since the war had started. And the declaration really didn’t mean much of anything in the context of the war, although it did give the English Tories a good laugh about the rich white folk calling for liberty while they held millions of Africans in slavery.

So we have another holiday of dubious importance. And we can add to this an even larger dose of American jingoism than we usually get. Despite appearances, I’m not anti-American. I love my country as I love my mother. And that means I don’t pretend that either are anything that they are not. There is a great deal to like about America. But there is a great deal to be embarrassed about. Our bombing campaign, including the two atomic bombs, against Japanese civilians was shameful. I don’t especially blame our support of despots throughout the world, but our rhetoric about liberty makes such behavior shameful. Our recent torture program that our government hasn’t even been willing to admit to is disgusting. It is still “enhanced interrogation” rather than torture. That’s like calling murder “enhanced spiritual processing.” And, of course, I don’t know how anyone can’t refrain from taking down their flags today after seeing the smiling Americans in this picture:

I could go on and on and on. Countries don’t become dominant empires without being evil. The problem the government had with the Abu Ghraib pictures was not that these things were going on. The problem was the American people saw them. It didn’t really matter that the rest of the world saw them; they already knew in a general sense. But as usual, the government made a show of punishing a couple of low level people and sweeping the rest under the carpet. “This isn’t who we are!”

And indeed, that’s true. We are much, much worse. But that’s not to say that many of us do not try to do better. After all, that’s why atrocities like Abu Ghraib and the My Lai Massacre have to be kept from the people. Most people (not just Americans) are decent. Of course, those in power claim they do what they do for the good of the people. This is rarely true. What they do, they do for the good of their rich and powerful friends—and for themselves.

The Declaration of Independence was not a general document. It didn’t apply to women or blacks or poor whites. Most of the rich white men who signed it didn’t want to get rid of aristocracy; they wanted to get rid of English aristocracy. Men like John Adams explicitly wanted an American aristocracy. Because, you know, whoever is rich right now are the people who should be in charge forever.

But do you know who the Declaration of Independence really didn’t apply to? The native peoples. Before Europeans came, there were many millions of natives in what is now America. But by 1800, there were only 600,000. And by 1890, there were only 250,000. Not all of that was due to an intentional genocide, but quite a lot of it was. In 2000, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) released a formal appology. It’s quite a document, because it is so not like what I hear from conservatives (and sadly many liberals as well) that wronged minority groups should just, “Get over it!” The BIA noted, “And while the BIA employees of today did not commit these wrongs, we acknowledge that the institution we serve did. We accept this inheritance, this legacy of racism and inhumanity. And by accepting this legacy, we accept also the moral responsibility of putting things right.”

Here is a small bit of that document:

Perhaps surprisingly, this makes me proud. I don’t expect anyone or any country to be perfect. But the first step to improving our behavior is to admit our wrongs. I so wish that we could outlaw the chant, “We’re number one!” For one thing, in many bad ways, we are number one. I would replace that chant with something that many of us would embrace, “We’re trying to be better!” Because all the proclamations of how great we are only arrest us in our efforts to improve.

If freedom is what Independence Day is really all about, then we should see the Declaration of Independence as a deeply flawed beginning of a very long road we have traveled and must continue to travel. We have very far to go.

See Also: Previous Independence Day Articles

2013: Four Independence Days
2012: Happy 4th: American Imperialism
2011: I Felt Like a Gringo

In the long run, John Roberts is going to go down as one of the worst chief justices of the Supreme Court. I don’t say that because I disagree with the rulings of the court. That’s a given, even when the court isn’t so skewed. The problem for Roberts’ legacy is that the Court is getting totally out of control. It no longer seems like a deliberative body and seems more like just another legislature where the Republicans and the Democrats battle it out.

This was especially clear to me yesterday when I read, Supreme Court OKs Another Religious Birth Control Exemption. I’ll give you the details in a moment, but the short version is this: on Monday, the Court said one thing and then on Thursday, they reversed themselves. This is not surprising, of course. As I wrote on Monday, the conservatives on the Court seem to have thrown out the whole idea of consistency. Just as with Bush v Gore before, this week the Court carved out a special exception for one particular belief of a particular kind of Christian. We know that they will not apply this logic generally because it would mean the end of law in the United States.

You may remember some time back that the Obama administration came up with a birth control compromise for religious-oriented nonprofits. The idea was that the groups would not pay for birth control but the insurance companies would provide it at their cost. The truth of the matter is that there is no cost because generally, birth control pays for itself. Pregnancies and babies are very expensive. Well, in Monday’s decision, the majority praised this compromise. So why is it on Thursday that the very same majority gave Wheaton College a temporary exemption from the contraceptive mandate?

Here’s how it is supposed to work: if a group felt that they might endanger their seat in heaven by providing birth control to their employees, they needed to file a form saying, “Hell no, we hate hoes!” But Wheaton College didn’t even do that. They just went to court and asked for an exception and they got it. Actually, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals said no. And the Supreme Court overruled it. It will undoubtedly be heard as a case next year.

There are two issues here. First, the Court majority is saying that the harm done to individuals until the case is fully resolved (for example, death) is nothing compared to the hurt feelings of institutions like Wheaton College. It also signals that the conservatives are planning to find that the religious exception doesn’t just apply to closely held companies who are absolutely, positively certain that they know exactly what God wants. (Note: one of the things that Wheaton knows God doesn’t want is Catholics, since in 2004 they fired a philosophy professor who converted to Catholicism.)

Second, it is now clear that the majority’s argument in Burwell v Hobby Lobby where they praised the administration’s compromise was just to allow them political cover. It was meant to make them seem reasonable. The fact is that at least four of the justices are nothing but ideologues who are determined to put their particular brand of Christianity in a state of quasi-official religion.

Of course, as is typical of the conservative bullies on the court, the order was not signed. So Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan put out a 16-page signed dissent. Sotomayor wrote, “I have deep respect for religious faith, for the important and selfless work performed by religious organizations and for the values of pluralism. But the Court’s grant of an injunction in this case allows Wheaton’s beliefs about the effect of its actions to trump the democratic interest in allowing the Government to enforce the law.” She also noted “those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word. Not so today.”

Indeed they can’t. And that’s why I think Roberts will be vilified in the future. And he’s very clearly aware of what’s going on at the court. That’s why he found in favor of Obamacare in the first place. But when the issue is his Christian faith (He’s actually a Catholic; maybe he should have thought about that when siding with the anti-Catholic bigotry that defines Wheaton College.) he can’t seem to stop himself. It’s like religion disrupts his thinking ability.

I’m generally fairly tolerant of religion. But I’m getting to the point of siding with Christopher Hitchens in the subtitle of God Is Not Great: religion does poison everything.

Timothy Egan is a columnist for The New York Times and he is usually pretty good. But today, he wrote one of the stupidest or most disingenuous columns I’ve read in a long time, Declaration of Independents. It is about the growing number of so called independents. And it bemoans that fact that they have no one to vote for. The partisans have their parties, but who speaks for the independents? I have such a desire to slap Timothy Egan, you cannot even imagine.

As we all know, voters who refuse to claim a political party are almost all partisans. And they are not, as is usually claimed, people in between the parties. In my experience, when someone claims to be “independent,” chances are that it means that they think the Republican Party is too liberal. And it works the other way too: some liberals claim to be independent because they find the Democratic Party too conservative. But they are more likely to call themselves “socialist” or something similar. Conservatives really don’t have anything to call themselves other than “fascist,” and while that term may apply, few people want to associate with the word.

Egan’s biggest problem is that he treats “independents” as though they are some monolithic group. They aren’t. He even notes that the recent trend has been for self identified independents to come from the Republican Party. Based upon the recent news that is reported in his own paper, does he really think these are people leaving the party because it is too conservative and that it doesn’t get anything done? Sure: there are some. But my perception of this group is not that they are open to voting for more moderate politicians. Rather, it is that they are simply embarrassed to associate with the Republican Party. In the privacy of the ballot box, they vote as they wouldn’t in public.

To make matters worse, Egan then sums up what his mythical independent voters believe in:

Oh, I see: so the independents believe in exactly what the Democrats believe in. The real question is, if you asked these independents which party they would pick if they had to, you’d see that, yes, the independents skew slightly Democratic. The problem with them as a group, is that exactly the ones who are in the center of the political spectrum are the ones who are least likely to vote.

I don’t really know what Egan thinks he is doing in his article. It would be nice to have more choices in terms of people to vote for. But the truth is that the Democratic Party is a big tent. The only two “independents” in Congress both caucus with the Democrats. Perhaps Egan has forgotten his Shakespeare:

If what the “independents” want is what the Democrats have to offer, why would calling them independents matter? Bernie Sanders is an independent, but calls himself a socialist. I just think of him a good solid liberal Democrat. I don’t care what he calls himself or how he shows up on the Senate roll call. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why an otherwise smart guy like Egan would care.

See Also:

South Will Fall Again (with Obamacare)
Potato Famine

As regular readers know, I am not an optimist. Most probably think me cynical and pessimistic. I don’t see myself that way. I just react to reality as I find it. And sometimes, I’m really optimistic. After the first presidential debate in 2012, all my liberal friends were bummed out. So was I. But then the October Jobs Report came out and it was great! So I became downright cheery because, “It’s the economy, stupid!” But most of my friends did not see it that way. But they were wrong and I was right. I don’t mean to gloat. I just mean to point out that when I’m optimistic, you should probably pay attention.

Like most liberals, I am concerned about the Democrats losing the Senate in November. For a long time, I’ve estimated that that this has about a 50% chance of happening. Indeed, that is more or less where The Upshot has been predicting for months. But the one thing that will really improve the Democrats’ chances is if the economy continues to improve. And I’ve been pretty bullish on this. It’s really very simple. The economy is under-performing. There is a lot of unused capacity and I just don’t see a reason why things would reverse now.

But in case you didn’t know it, it is not the first Friday of the month. But tomorrow is a federal holiday, so the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has come out with its June Jobs Report. And it is a humdinger! The economy added 288,000 new jobs. And the BLS revised the last two months’ employment figures up by a total of 29,000. That actually puts April creating 304,000 jobs. You can always find things in the jobs report to complain about, but overall, it is a really good report.

If you want to get into the details and even find some things to feel bad about, Matt Yglesias at Vox, put together an excellent run down of what various people are saying about various parts of the report, Economy Adds 288,000 New Jobs, Unemployment Rate Falls. You might have noticed that I didn’t mention the unemployment rate. That’s because it is meaningless. In particular, the economy still hasn’t turned the corner in the eyes of Americans. More people are leaving the job market than are finding jobs. But it looks like this will not be true for much longer.

The reason this makes me feel better about the Senate is that as the economy improves, so will people’s opinion of President Obama. And so when they go to the polls, they will be more likely to think, “You know, the Democrats are doing a good job; now is not the time to switch horses.” Even more important, feeling good about Obama will make more Democrats decide to actually go to the trouble of voting. And it won’t take much for the Democrats to hold onto the Senate.

It is still too soon to tell. But if July adds 300,000 jobs and August does the same, people are going to notice. That alone will probably reverse the dominance of people leaving the job market. And that means people will be feeling better about the state of things. Of course, even if the Republicans do retake the Senate, it won’t mean much. They are almost certain to lose it again in 2016. But having a Democratic Senate would generally be helpful to Obama in his last two years—especially regarding the appointment of judges. If the Republicans take the Senate, they will probably not allow anyone to be confirmed. That would be bad, but not catastrophic.

So it would be best if the Democrats held onto the Senate. And today’s Jobs Report bodes well for that.

In a short blog post, The Great Disinvestment, Paul Krugman noted, “[I]t’s absurd that the federal gasoline tax has been flat in nominal terms since 1993, which means that in real terms it has fallen 40 percent.” That really struck me because it so highlights the results of the Republican Party’s absolute insistence on never raising taxes. There is nothing principled about this stance; it is just irresponsible.

In The Wrecking Crew, Thomas Frank argued that conservatives are not just naturally bad at governing. He claimed that they intentionally ruin the effectiveness of government and rack up large debts so that when the Democratic Party is in power, it will have to spend most of its time and resources fixing the damage. I do not accept this thesis. It is too Machiavellian, and frankly, I don’t think that they are cunning enough for such a project.

But I wrote about the book before, Why Are Republicans the Wrecking Crew? In it, I discussed how it doesn’t actually matter. The result is the same. The Republicans rule both incompetently and recklessly. When the Democrats come into office, they do feel that they must clean up the mess. That’s a fundamental problem because Democrats do want the government to work. But it isn’t as though the Republicans don’t want the government to work. It is just that they get carried away by their rhetoric.

Let’s look at the federal budget from 2011, but it always looks about like this:

Most of that is stuff that Republicans want to keep, or at very least, know that they would cease to be a viable political party is they touched. So all their posturing is nothing more than their attempts to harm Democratic constituencies while rewarding their own. This was clearly on display with the most recent farm bill. The Republicans actually wanted to give farmers—who are mostly large corporations—more money while they gutted the food stamp program. One of the reasons that we even have a food stamp program is because price supports (welfare for farmers) makes food more expensive (a tax on people who eat). So it was seen as only fair that the government help out the poor since they were paying more for food than they should.

As for the gas tax, well, Republicans don’t care about paying for things. Actually, the obsession with “pay fors” is one of the maladies of the Democratic Party. Republicans only think we should pay for things when the Democrats are in power. Meanwhile, over the last two decades, the gas tax is roughly half what it was two decades ago. This is while we should (1) be encouraging people to drive less with higher taxes, and (2) have more money to repair our crumbling infrastructure.

This is why we can’t have nice things bridges that don’t fall down.

Afterword

The gas tax is not the only way we pay for bridges and roads. But the fact that we can’t raise taxes—even to keep up with inflation—is indicative of why the United States is literally falling apart.

I always thought that Cosmopolitan was just a silly fashion magazine. But I’ll admit, I have never so much as looked inside an issue. Then today, Digby linked to an article by Jill Filipovic, Hobby Lobby Supporters Insist Decision Isn’t Sexist, Tell Women to Close Their Legs. It’s one of the best things I’ve read yet in the aftermath of Burwell v Hobby Lobby. (See my discussion: SCOTUS Says Not All Religions Are Equal.)

Primarily, the article is about the reaction of people on the right to women who had the audacity to be angry or disappointed with the decision in the case. It includes some real gems from Twitter. Filipovic made the infinitely reasonable observation, “Really glad the same #prolife folks who oppose abortion rights are making it harder for women to prevent unintended pregnancy.” AmericaWoman responded, “@JillFilipovic be accountable for your own blood I’ll keep your legs closed.” (I know, it doesn’t exactly make sense, but you get the idea.) There was a whole lot of discussion about keeping legs closed and using aspirin tablets. In fact, #CloseYourLegs was very big for a while.

Of course, when it was a man writing, the tweets normally used the word “whore.” The unalterably vile and stupid Patrick Dollard tweeted, “MSNBC Whore Irin Carmon: Hobby Lobby Ruling Is Nothing But An ‘All-Out Assault’ On Contraceptives.” Ssgt. Richard Davis tweeted, “IF YOU WANT TO BE A WHORE & SLEEP W/ EVERY MAN YOU FIND PAY FOR YOUR OWN BIRTH CONTROL. 10 BUCKS AT WALGREENS. SO GO BE WHORE’S.” And Tim Gradous was a total winner, seemingly believing that God is dead or has changed his mind, “Two Aspirin between knees is 100% effective, God knew. If you can’t pay don’t Play…” Note also how Mr Gradous seems to think that pregnancy is solely the concern of the woman.

What’s especially terrible about all of this is that I figure that these are just conservatives without enough control of the ids. The five men on the Court who made up the majority probably think these same things. They just know better than to communicate their thoughts in such a raw form. I don’t say this lightly. We know that the brain works that way. With all due respect to Stephen Colbert’s satire, we do pretty much decide with our “guts” and then use our higher brain functions to justify those primal “thoughts.” As smart as he may be, I think the fact that 24 was once Antonin Scalia’s favorite television show demonstrates that there is more gut than brain on the court. If the five conservatives on the court had been women, at least some of them would have dissented and the case would have been struck down. There is no doubt of that.

Jill Filipovic also noted what I think is going to be the lasting legacy of this decision:

In the long run, I think that Burwell v Hobby Lobby will turn into one of those historical embarrassments for the Supreme Court like Dred Scott v Sandford and Plessy v Ferguson. It’s like the Court has opened a wound in the law that conservatives will claw away at. And I would go further than Ginsburg. At least there is a Biblical case to be made for segregation. There is no biblical case to be made against birth control. And, in fact, until the mid-1970s, protestants didn’t have a problem with abortion, much less birth control.

The only really important thing I learned from the racist Ayn Rand was how totalitarian regimes oppress their people. They don’t rigorously enforce all kinds of laws. They just have all kinds of laws laying around that they apply to anyone who becomes a problem. Well, going forward, the Supreme Court has set up a similar situation. Companies (I’m sure the “closely held” part will go away soon enough—especially if we get any more conservatives on the court.) will have all kinds of religious rights—as long as those religious rights go along with what the conservatives on the court believe.

The point that Filpovic makes is that this case isn’t about religious freedom at all. It is about conservatives who have never made peace with the slipping power of patriarchy. Of course, it’s interesting that the same conservatives who want women to stay at home with a Duggar-style family are not so interested as to allow union rights and minimum wage laws that might make a single-earner household possible. The overall conservative agenda isn’t just to keep women down. The whole thing is about keeping everyone but the power elites down. One thing that many people seem to forget is that birth control doesn’t just free women; if anything, it frees men more. And the power elite don’t like the poorer classes to have freedom. Corporations are people because they are owned by the rich. A zygote’s rights trump those of the host mother because she’s poor.

This is modern America.