I noticed a couple of weeks ago that I had totally stopped watching The Daily Show. So I went back and watched a week of it. It’s still quite a funny show. But it is nothing you won’t see on countless other late night talk shows. There is nothing insightful about it. And I say this as one who had my problems with the show under Jon Stewart. I agree with Emmett Rensin in The Smug Style in American Liberalism. There was always a problem with it trying to be non-ideological and thinking that policy fights were really just a question of everyone accepting what the facts are.

But the new show with Trevor Noah is just an exercise is triviality. I have to question the idea of giving the show to a recent immigrant, given the tendency to see one’s new locale as charming and benign. And the United States is really not either of those things. Or at least not things that make for good social satire. Another problem may be his age. Certainly, John Oliver seems to be more in the tradition of Jon Stewart, and he is both older and less of a newcomer to the nation.

Oliver definitely is continuing the smug style of liberalism. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As I’ve noted in the past, when Jon Stewart hosted The Daily Show, I may have had problems with it but I watched it every day. And John Oliver’s long segments on Last Week Tonight are incredible. His most recent was an excellent example, but also telling because it isn’t about politics at all. It’s about scientific studies and the terrible job that the media does in discussing them. Check it out:

This is an old problem in statistics. If you do the same study enough times, you will occasionally get a study that finds something that is incorrect. This is something that drives me crazy about the way polls are presented. I often hear things like, “Candidate A and B are in a statistical tie.” This is because the two candidates are closer than the margin of error. But this is meaningless. The margin of error is just a measure of how many people were sampled. No one poll is very meaningful, although it might by chance be correct.

The reason that the smug style of liberalism is really not a problem to me is because our society is so out of kilter that just getting the facts right is a big deal. It reminds me of what I said about Paul Krugman years ago: he’s a lot more conservative than I am and I look forward to the day that I start disagreeing with him. That day is at hand, of course. Just check out his recent blog post, The Facts Have A Well-Known Center-Left Bias — a clear case of false equivalence.

But it is sad to see The Daily Show sink even below the smug style. It isn’t helped by the fact that Noah now has Donald Trump to slam night after night. It does make me wonder what will happen once Donald Trump goes away and Noah doesn’t have permission to go after so much else that is just as dangerous, but perhaps not as obviously so.

It’s sad to say, but I miss Jon Stewart’s smug style of non-ideological liberalism. I can’t imagine a day in my lifetime that we won’t need it.

Political scientists Boris Heersink and Jeffery Jenkins wrote what I think is an incredibly insightful article over at The Monkey Cage, GOP Voters Picked Trump. Party Leaders Aren’t Falling in Line. Here’s Why That’s Surprising. The basis of the article is what politicians gain by joining a political party and what they give up.

They note that there has been a great deal of research done on what being in a political party provides. The biggest thing is that parties help individual politicians win — elections as well as battles over law making. They also note that relatively little research has been done on what they give up in joining a political party. That may be because it’s kind of obvious: they give up their independence.

Give a Little and Get a Little

Now I understand, none of this is shocking. Everyone has been a member of a group. And you know that you give a little and you get a little. This is, by the way, why I’m against the Bernie or Bust movement. While it’s true that Hillary isn’t my perfect candidate, neither is Bernie. If I wanted perfection, I would write in myself for every elected office in every election ever.

The problem that Heersink and Jenkins highlight is that Donald Trump hasn’t given anything to the party. He is entirely himself without making any compromises to the party. Thus, why should the party offer him all the good things that come with being in the party when he hasn’t and likely won’t reciprocate. I’m very much with John Dean: Donald Trump is a classic authoritarian leader. He’s also a narcissist. It’s all about him. I’m sure that a 1% chance of his becoming president more than offsets a 99% chance that he will destroy the political party he is nominally attached to.

Cruz Is Even More Disloyal to His Political Party

But what goes unmentioned in the article is Ted Cruz. And I think he is an even better example of this. That’s because Trump has used the Republican presidential nomination for his own purposes, but he hasn’t really used the party otherwise. He might have been able to do this well as an independent. Ted Cruz on the other hand, has used the Republican Party to win at the state level and then at the national level. But he has been the very definition of disloyal. He’s been one of the Democrats’ most potent weapons since he entered the Senate.

The conclusion of the Heersink and Jenkins article is that by Republican elites not going along with what their voters clearly want, “The result could be a complete fracturing of the party.” But I think that the fracture appeared a long time ago when candidates like Ted Cruz started getting elected. If you look at the primary so far, over 70% of all Republican votes have been for Cruz or Trump — candidates who take and do not give to the party. The base doesn’t care about the party. The base has been trained by the party itself to think that the base should get everything it wants and should never have to compromise about anything.

And I can’t blame them. Since at least Bill Clinton, the Republicans have not argued that the Democrats, as a political party, are wrong about policy, but that they are foreign interlopers bent on destroying the nation. The Republican Party is already fractured. The question is whether it will be destroyed.

Economist JP Koning wrote a fascinating article last week, What Makes Medieval Money Different From Modern Money? The quick answer: medieval money didn’t have its value printed on it. So, for example, a testoon wasn’t worth any set amount. So if you wanted to buy something that cost a pound, you wouldn’t automatically know how many testoons would be required to pay off that debt. The value of the testoon would be set by royal decree. So if the testoon was decreed to be worth one-twentieth of a pound, you would need 20 of the little buggers to buy the product. Now what has this got to do with monetary policy.

Think back on the 2008 financial crisis. That was just the most obvious sign of the bursting of an $8 trillion housing bubble. And it was that burst bubble that caused the recession. People all over the country woke up one day to find that they actually had a lot less money than they thought they had. Or more often, they learned that they were in a lot more debt than they had thought. That would have been a great time for some inflation. Instead, we got a short period of deflation and then very low inflation for the next 7 years.

The Federal Reserve has had a hard time keeping inflation even at its low 2% target. But what if the Fed could have just dictated inflation? Think of our example above. If the kingdom found itself in recession, the king could proclaim that there were now only 19 testoons in a pound. People aren’t idiots, of course. They would realize that a pound was only worth 95% of what it used to be. So they would raise their prices (products and labor) by roughly 5%. Ta da! It’s like a magic trick: instant inflation.

But now, without doing anything at all, you have helped out the debtors. They would owe fewer testoons than they had before the new decree. This would allow them to deleverage more quickly and get the economy going that much faster. Given that lenders are generally rich, we aren’t worried that modest inflation would reduce their consumption. The king could also use this system to fight inflation by increasing the number of testoons in a pound to 20 or even 21.

Obviously, this is a gross generalization. Koning’s point is that the medieval monetary system was more flexible than one might have thought. But I take away something more sobering. If the Fed had the ability to do this, it might have used it in very minor ways to help out after the 2008 crash. But it wouldn’t have done so aggressively. The Fed chair at that time, Ben Bernanke, has been very clear that he think he and the Fed did a great job.

The problem with the Federal Reserve hasn’t really been a lack of tools, but rather a philosophy that hurting the rich even the smallest amount (a 5% inflation rate would be considered outrageous by those now in power) is unacceptable. I don’t know how much the kings of old used such monetary tools to make life better for the people. I doubt it was used much and for the same reason that our monetary policy is to have a 2% level of inflation: because those in power don’t actually care about the vast majority of the people.

The thing about free trade is that it makes markets more efficient. One country doesn’t have to depend upon itself for all of the things that it needs. This lowers costs all around and makes the world richer. In theory, I’m all for free trade. In practice, I’m against it. This is because as trade barriers have been taken down over the last four decades, the economic gains have not been shared; they have gone overwhelmingly to the already rich. This is what happened with NAFTA in the US: it did increase profits, but it didn’t help the American worker. But we hear a lot that it was at least good for Mexico.

There is a certain strain of liberalism that likes this idea very much. From their vantage point, the poor here in the US may have it bad, but they should shut up because the poor in Zimbabwe have it even worse. I discussed this in an article last year, Data Journalists Don’t Know Anything About the Poor Anywhere. The problem is that these journalists are usually in the top quintile of income in this country and so the poor everywhere are abstractions to them. So they are the kind of people who would argue that damage done to US workers would be acceptable for the sake of the even more poor people in Mexico.

Part of the problem here is that this whole globalization game isn’t much different in other countries than it is here. The greater trade might lead to more GDP, but its all captured by those at the top. But sadly, we don’t even have to make that argument. The truth is that since NAFTA, Mexico’s economy has done really poorly. Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) wrote two years ago, NAFTA: 20 Years of Regret for Mexico. And he summed up what the first two decades brought Mexico:

If you want to take a deep dive into the subject, check out the CEPR document, Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years (PDF).

Weisbrot’s colleague at CEPR, Dean Baker, has been documenting the way that The Washington Post consistently exaggerates how well the Mexican economy has done. This is entirely typical of mainstream US news coverage. And it is in direct contrast to its coverage of official US government enemies like Venezuela, where nothing that they do will ever be seen as good.

The truth of the matter is that trade deals like NAFTA are created by the rich for the benefit of the rich. And even economists who once thought they were wonderful (for theoretical reasons), are now backing away. As Weisbrot noted, “When economists who have promoted NAFTA from the beginning are called upon to defend the agreement, the best that they can offer is that it increased trade.” But no one cares about trade as a goal; it is a means to a goal: shared prosperity. And Mexico has not shared in that prosperity.

Matt Bruenig brought my attention to something, Diaper Stamps. It’s the kind of idea that I very much associate with the modern Democratic Party. The thought is great: give poor people access to diapers. But the implementation is just awful. To begin with, a whole new program for diapers?! Why not a special program for car seats? And blankets? And those mobiles people hang over cribs?! Really: why don’t we create a program for every single aspect of the lives of poor people? Because that’s what this is all about. Underneath this proposal is the idea that the poor can’t manage their own lives.

We have conservatives like David Brooks and Charles Murray who tell us that the poor suffer from some sort of cultural problem. That is why they are poor. If only they acted like the middle class then they would magically be in the middle class. It’s offensive. Most of the time, it is racist — implicitly or explicitly. But at least these guys know what they are doing. They want their taxes low and so it is just good rhetoric to come up with “reasons” to do nothing about poverty. The situation is rather worse for liberals.

In my experience, upper income liberals buy into the exact same garbage that Brooks and Murray push, but they aren’t aware of it. This is why they are always coming up with programs where poor people are told what to buy. You see, the poor can’t be trusted. So the two sides of the political fence on the issue of the poor is either do nothing (conservative) or treat them as if they were children (liberal). It’s shameful.

I think the reason we have this is because Americans have convinced themselves that we do not live in a class system. In the UK, people are much more likely to see that people are born, live, and die poor because that’s just the way it is. But here, in the land of “opportunity,” anyone can supposedly grow up to be president. And in that paradigm, if people are poor, it is their own damned fault.

In my life, people tell me food stamp “horror stories” all the time. Let’s look at two classics:

• “I saw this guy at the grocery store buying a candy bar and a coke. And then he whips out his EBT card to pay for it! Can you believe it?!”
• “I saw this gal at the grocery store buying New York steak. And then she whips out her EBT card to pay for it! I wish I could afford to eat New York steak!

Note first the attribution bias here. All of the people complaining about the first case have, from time to time, eaten junk. But this one guy buying junk food with an EBT card is assumed to be the norm. That guy just doesn’t know how to feed himself! But the complainer would realize that they normally have a reason when they make each food choice. Similarly, in the second case, every complainer has eaten New York steak. It is probably even more unusual for the gal on food stamps.

But what’s even more telling in this is that people on food stamps can’t win. Unless they buy only dried rice and beans, someone is going to complain that they aren’t eating well enough or that they are eating too well. The truth, of course, is that, People on Food Stamps Make Healthier Grocery Decisions Than Most of Us. This is very much in alignment with the twice as good myth, a strain of African American thought that if they were just twice as good, the white community would accept them.

And the truth is that when the vast majority of people who get food stamps use them to make wise decisions, it is either not noticed or taken as the exception that proves the rule.

So diaper stamps. Instead of just giving poor people more money, kindhearted liberals want to give them diaper stamps. Matt Yglesias used to be fond of saying, “If you want to help the poor, give them money.” It’s a shockingly simple approach. Certainly too simple for the modern Democratic Party! But on most metrics, poor people are more reliable than affluent people. For example, they use drugs less. And there’s an obvious reason for that: drugs are expensive. But we keep pushing this idea that poor people can’t be trusted with money. And that’s just not true.

Afterword: The “Bad” Poor People

It is true that there are poor people who take loads of drugs. There are poor people who do lots of terrible things. But just because one poor person turns out to be a serial killer doesn’t mean we should put all poor people in jail. I’m making a case based upon the class of poor people. And they can be trusted. People who want to base policy on that one person they saw misusing food stamps are just idiots. Maybe we should start making food choices for them.

Steve M over at No More Mister Nice Blog made an interesting point about how the push for a third party candidate may be an attempt to recreate the conditions in 1992 and 1996, where Bill Clinton did not get a majority. I don’t really buy the argument (nor does he) because it doesn’t matter what happens when a Democrat is elected president: the Republican Party treats them as though they are invalid. Most conservatives are convinced that if it weren’t for voter fraud, the Republicans would win every election in a landslide.

But he wrote something that I am very skeptical about, “That may not be completely crazy polls show that Clinton would lose to a Republican who was less offputting than Trump or Ted Cruz — Kasich, for instance.” And he linked to a study by Morning Consult, 50 State Snapshot. I don’t buy it — at all. We can start with the fact that polls this early are generally meaningless. But it is especially meaningless when it comes to John Kasich.

There are a few things that make any polling results related to John Kasich particularly stupid. First, most people don’t even know who he is. And those who do know don’t know much about him. And everything that is known about him is put through the lens of Donald Trump. Kasich is the “reasonable” Republican. The fact is that he is ridiculously conservative and not a very nice guy (very much like Chris Christie). This is not the kind of thing that would stay hidden in a general election.

So what this study really shows is how people feel about Hillary Clinton generally. And like anyone who is well known, she has high disapproval ratings. So that poll is more or less Clinton vs Clinton. And the fact that she comes close to winning even in that theoretical match up is pretty amazing. But to show you how absurd it is, the match up indicates that John Kasich would win Oregon, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. There is no way they are going red, so that brings Clinton’s total up to 255. And I also have a hard time believing that Michigan would go red in a presidential election, and that would put Clinton over the top.

None of this is to say that the Democrats can just skate through this election. The economic fundamentals are very slightly negative for the Democrats. But what I expect is for the unemployment rate to stay roughly flat during the next five months, which will make this campaign roughly a wash. But if unemployment starts to take off, a candidate like John Kasich really could have won. I tend to think that Donald Trump is so horrible a candidate, that even a stark rise in the unemployment rate wouldn’t put him over the top.

I’m willing to admit that a head-to-head polling match up between Clinton and Trump might have some predictive value. They are both, after all, widely known and for a long time. And you could make a case for Cruz (who actually loses worse in the poll, because he doesn’t win Maine). But ultimately, this is going to be another race between a Democrat and a Republican. John Kasich may have the reputation of being a different kind of Republican, but he isn’t. And his negatives would go way up in a general election.

Although I’ve long been as certain as I am about anything that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, I have never wanted Bernie Sanders to drop out. Part of this is just an intuition that I’ve had that these hard-fought battles really don’t hurt candidates in the general election. So I was pleased to see some backup on this from political scientist Julia Azari over at FiveThirtyEight, Sanders Shouldn’t Drop Out For Clinton’s Sake. The take away from the article is that it doesn’t look like hard-fought primary fights affect the general election.

But this, I think, is key, “You could cherry-pick studies to argue that contentious primary races hurt a nominee, but even those effects are small.” So this idea that Sanders ought to drop out of the race for the good of the Democrats’ general election chances don’t really hold up. I don’t blame Clinton supporters for calling for him to step down. (To her credit, Clinton has not called for him to drop out, as far as I know.) This is always what supporters who are winning say. But the idea that Sanders is doing something wrong is sub-mental (ie, tribal). And I think we really should allow this process to continue, even though I don’t personally like the conflict.

On the other hand, if Sanders really does want to litigate this at the DNC, I might change my mind — especially given that he is likely to lose California by a good deal. But I don’t really think that’s what’s going on. I think Sanders is just positioning himself to get as much out of this campaign as possible. And as one who thinks that the Democratic Party has moved much too far to the right (and thus deserves a good deal of blame for the Republicans moving into crazy-land), I want to see some changes. And the fact of the matter is that there are only about five percentage points separating Clinton and Sanders. And I don’t think that’s nearly a fair assessment of the Democratic Party base, because Clinton has a long history and a lot of good will among the base.

What was most interesting in Azari’s article was here discussion of a recent study that found that hard-fought primary battles don’t divide parties, but rather the other way around. Hard-fought primary battles are the result of divided parties. And I think that’s clearly the case in the Democratic Party. The party has moved steadily rightward and it is due for a correction. (And I’ve written before about how the right turn of the party was not necessary, so I won’t go into that.)

But there are some practical issues here. Clinton didn’t drop out this early in 2008. She stayed in the race until after the final primary. And I mean no disrespect, but we should remember that Sanders has done better as time has gone on, and the opposite was happening to Clinton in 2008. So if she didn’t drop out then, why should Sanders drop out now?

What I most dislike about this idea is that I think it does represent a kind of aristocratic impulse in people. Ultimately, people do want a coronation — if they think they happen to be winning. And this is something that really bothers me about us as a species. I think that liberals are a good deal more rational than conservatives in the modern political context. Yet we are all motivated by these primitive instincts. It’s sad.

But it is way too early for Sanders to drop out.

As I checked in every day at New York Magazine, I kept seeing that the top story was, “America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny.” I figured it was just another story about Donald Trump, and frankly, so what? I really don’t like Trump, but I don’t see how he is really any different than the other people the Republicans had on offer for the presidency. But finally, I clicked over — probably more because of the Zohar Lazar’s Bernie Wrightson-esque illustration. What I found was an article by Andrew Sullivan with the actual title, Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic.

Oh brilliant! Now Andrew Sullivan comes back to explain to us that Donald Trump is the result of too much democracy. Oh, and he read The Republic in graduate school! And maybe read It Can’t Happen Here at some point too! Oh, what an erudite man, Sullivan is! But the almost 8,000 word essay is a mass of contradictions. In particular, there is too much democracy that is allowing the people to elect a man who will bring tyranny; and the people are angry because the elites haven’t been listening to them since the early 1990s. But what does any of that matter?! Andrew Sullivan is a perfect example of a Very Serious Person.

And it is in this capacity that I found the article most hilarious. He noted that, “The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force.” Obviously, this doesn’t really go along with the “too much democracy,” but whatever. Andrew Sullivan thinks that the people want “compromise.” They aren’t upset about a lack of compromise. They are upset about things like NAFTA — a great example of compromise — and something that Sullivan has always been a big supporter of.

The idea of “compromise” for Very Serious Idiots like Andrew Sullivan is that it is a way for them to get their preferred conservative economic policies. His list of elite failure is “massive and increasing public debt,” “a disastrous war in the Middle East,” and allowing financial markets to crash the economy.

The first item is standard Very Serious Simpson-Bowles nonsense. If only we could get conservative Democrats and standard Republicans together, everything would be wonderful! Is Sullivan for raising taxes on the rich? Is he for raising the cap on Social Security? In general, no. Sullivan is a Thatcherite to the core; he hasn’t changed, it is just that the Democratic Party has moved to him.

We did get a disastrous war in the Middle Easy — one that was cheered on by Andrew Sullivan. And the fact that he thinks it was financial markets that crashed the economy rather than the bursting of an $8 trillion housing bubble is typical of the Very Serious People in that they all “know” what the others “know” which is usually wrong.

But let’s be clear of what’s actually going on with Trump. Nate Silver wrote a very interesting article yesterday, The Mythology Of Trump’s “Working Class” Support. It turns out that Trump voters are quite well to do — not as well to do as Kasich voters, but much more well to do than Clinton and Sanders voters. So Trump voters aren’t these poor working class people who are getting screwed; they are resentful whites who don’t like seeing their group identity lose its supremacy.

This is particularly interesting because in his own article, Andrew Sullivan pushes this same kind of white resentment. He used the phrase “white working class” five times. He only used the phrase “working class” without the white modifier once. And this is, after all, the guy who pushed Black People Are Stupider Than White People into the (Liberal!) mainstream.

After all those words, there really is nothing of value in Andrew Sullivan’s article. But it is funny that he seems so unaware of his own complicity in the false narrative he created.

Afterword: Andrew Sullivan on Bernie Sanders

Sullivan claims that Bernie Sanders’ core critique is that money in politics is destroying it. That is not his core critique. That is part of his core rhetoric. But his core critique is about economic inequality. Of course, Sullivan isn’t interested in that. He also refers to Sanders as “the demagogue of the left.” Sullivan should have put down The Republic in graduate school and picked up a dictionary. What a fool! So of course he’s taken Very Seriously.