The other day, I was working for a hate radio fan and I got to listen to hours of conservative pundits go on and on and on about how it was totally unacceptable for Obama to nominate a replacement of Antonin Scalia. It’s amazing to listen to these guys, because they are amazingly angry — 100% of the time. I can see why Rush Limbaugh is such a star. Compared to these freaks, he is nuanced and smart. But all of them think that the next president should nominate a replacement and their reasons are all the same: there must always be conservative do-overs.

It isn’t a surprise. This is the way it is among the power elite. Look at George W Bush. He was useless at business. But given enough chances, he eventually made his fortune — just as anyone else would. I’ve always found it hilarious to hear conservatives talk about how people should be rewarded for “taking risks.” These people don’t take risks. There is no risk of failure if you will simply be given another chance. And so now it is just accepted among conservatives that they too should get do-overs.

Think back to George W Bush’s second turn. The only reason Sandra Day O’Connor retired from the bench was because she got assurance from William Rehnquist that he wouldn’t retire. And then he died. So Bush got the opportunity to replace two judges, when he would have only gotten one, had Rehnquist just died a few months earlier. But the Democrats didn’t demand that they get another bit of the apple — hoping they would win the next election. It doesn’t matter if Rehnquist had died at the end of his term. And it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been the liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg who died.

Scalia Did the Same Thing!

This isn’t new at all. Last year, I wrote an article, Conservatives Want Obamacare Do-Over. In that I discussed how Scalia and Alito were making points about King v Burwell that were effectively asking for a do-over. They were saying, in effect, “There are problems in the law and Congress can fix them.” So what they were really saying is that the Democrats should have to pass Obamacare twice. That the Republicans should get a do-over. But it wasn’t just any do-over. It was a do-over in an environment where Obamacare was doomed. It’s like half a team badly injuring itself to score a final goal, and giving the opposite team the opportunity to play the game over against the half a team.

The same reasoning has gone on with regards to the Voting Rights Act. In that case, the Supreme Court noted that all Congress had to do was effectively re-litigate the Voting Rights Act. This is because it is always right and proper that liberal policy should have to be defended again and again and again. Conservatives should get endless chances to stop any kind of legislation they don’t like. It just wouldn’t be fair not to give them a do-over. And another. And another.

When I write about procedural politics, I try not to be like Charles Krauthammer. As you may remember, he was totally in favor of getting rid of the filibuster when the Republicans were in the majority. But later when filibuster abuse was much worse and the Democrats were in the majority, then he was totally against it.

I know that if things were reversed — a liberal had died and a Republican was in the White House — then conservatives would be making exactly the opposite argument. I believe if things were reversed like this, Democrats would be in despair, but they wouldn’t be arguing that there was some kind of historical precedent. It’s just ridiculous. These people don’t even try to make sense. They just know that the Republicans should be given another bite at the apple — a do over. We should all just pretend that Scalia didn’t die.

At the same time, let’s assume that Clinton is the next president of the United States. Well, these people will have been given their do-over. But they will want another. They know they can’t argue that Clinton shouldn’t be allowed to replace Scalia. So they will argue two different things. First, some will argue that the Justice must be conservative, even though they had no problem when the moderate (by today’s standards) Sandra Day O’Connor was replaced by a radical. Second, others will argue that 8 members of the Supreme Court is just great. After all, it was 6 when it first started.

The main thing is that nothing will satisfy them. It was fine for Obama to replace liberal justices with moderates. But there is just no way that they will accept Scalia being replaced with another moderate. They want do-overs until they get another George W Bush in the White House to replace Scalia with someone even worse.

Jonathan Chait wrote a great article recently, Donald Trump Is Getting Serious About Populism. I don’t want to get into his whole argument about Trump; go read the article. But I was thrilled to see what he had to say on the issue of populism. Because this has been the argument that I’ve been making for a very long time. “One of the important underlying facts of American politics is that rich people tend to have more socially liberal and economically conservative beliefs than the country as a whole.” This is exactly the opposite of populism.

So Trump is getting more populist by attacking what Teddy Roosevelt might have called “the interests”: big banks, defense contractors, big oil. And Byron York, maven of conservative thinking, wrote, As Vote Nears, a More Radical Trump Emerges. As Chait noted, “The new version of Trump is less radical, not more.” The problem is that we’ve gotten so used to a government by, for, and of the rich that it seems “radical” when a politician tries to appeal to the people.

Note that when Trump was just talking about Mexican rapists, the issue that conservatives had was not on substance, but on style. In their own ways, they wanted to “build a wall.” The Republican Party has had a “secure the boarder” mantra ever since Obama got into office, despite the fact of record deportations, and, More Mexicans Leaving Than Coming to the US. So Trump wasn’t a radical on that issue — just coarse and low. It’s only when he starts attacking the rich that he gets the label of “radical.”

And note: the conservative movement can’t get enough of attacks on the poor. And there is a whole industry of conservative pundits like Robert Samuelson who spend most of their time attacking middle class retired people. But that’s not radical because “radical” is defined relative to what the rich as a group think.

Populism Is Popular

I’m very sympathetic to populism. There are problems with it, of course. I greatly value diversity — for its own sake, but also because it is good biologically and sociologically. In general, it is also good economically. Immigrants enrich us — or they would so long as there is a fair economic system where the fruits of the nation are shared. (And they would be with populist economic policy.) And I’m not a social conservative. Most important of all, I consider reproductive rights, in addition to other things, an economic issue. But overall, I respect populism, and would give up a fair amount in order to get its economic policies.

But what really defines populism is that it is popular. If I had no knowledge of modern American politics, I would have thought that our country would have two parties that are on either side of populism. There would be one party that was a little more economically liberal and socially conservative, and there would be another that was a little more economically conservative and socially liberal. But we don’t have that at all. We have two parties that are distinctly to the right on economic issues. And on social issues, they are all over the map.

There are many reasons for why this is. Certainly, I think a big part of it is segregation and racism. But my interest here is not in explaining the why of the matter. The fact of the matter is that we clearly don’t live in a democracy, except in a nominal sense. This is bad for us and has been so for a long time. But you can depend upon not just conservatives but the mainstream media itself claiming that any move towards a more fair economic system is “radical.”

David Dayen wrote what turned out to be an amusing article over at New Republic, Michael Bloomberg’s Target Voter: Himself. It is about his grumbling that the people are tired of the extremism of the two parties and what they really want is a “moderate” like himself.

Obviously, coming from a billionaire, this is the basis of high comedy. Michael Bloomberg reminds me of Malvolio in Twelfth Night smiling and dressing like a clown. It also reminds me of a story I had read told by an ex-slave about his master doing target practice in preparation for the Civil War. Those with great power are most prone to make huge fools of themselves because they have no one to keep them in check.

Dayen described the true situation:

But even if you got rid of his gun and immigration policy preferences, conservative voters would still hate him. But this is all part of a larger issue about the class of people that Michael Bloomberg represents. They really do think they are in the “sweet spot” of American politics. They see gun right absolutists — people who think they should be allowed to carry machine guns into banks — as just the other extreme of people who think that the minimum wage ought to at least keep up with inflation.

This is why I’ve long been against the New Democrats. The movement was all about keeping socially liberal policy, but basically accepting conservative policy on economics. (The net result was to push the Republicans to the extreme right on economic policy and create a new “left of center” economics that is decidedly right of center.) And this is what I like most about Bernie Sanders: he’s willing to say what establishment Democrats have been unwilling to say for 25 years, “Neoliberalism doesn’t work.”

But as Dayen noted, there are a lot of people in the New York and DC areas who just love what Bloomberg has to say. To someone like William Saletan, what Bloomberg stands for is not just his opinion — it is The Truth™. It is self-evident to this crowd that the society is working just great. All it needs are a few tweaks: get people to drink less soda, get rid of unions all together, and everything will be fine!

The truth is that the Michael Bloomberg crowd doesn’t see their pro-Wall Street opinions as opinions. It is unthinkable to them that we could have a system that works differently than the one that I am more than willing to admit works for them. It’s bad enough when people just go about their lives without examining their assumptions. But when we are talking about the most powerful people in the country, we have a real problem.

Here’s the thing: if Michael Bloomberg ran for president, I’d be surprised if he got one percent of the vote. But he would get huge media attention because the elite media share his blind spots. I think Dayen was wrong in one thing he wrote. He noted Bloomberg’s “sycophantic advisers.” But the problem is so much deeper than that. Thomas Friedman isn’t paid to be Bloomberg’s yes-man. Thomas Friedman has the exact same unconsidered assumptions. And he’s not alone.

As ignorant as the people may be, they are far better at choosing a president than these jokers.

Paul Krugman wrote a really good column on Monday, How America Was Lost. I highly recommend reading it. But he wrote one thing that was not a reflection of the wider reality, “I still encounter people on the left (although never on the right) who claim that there’s no big difference between Republicans and Democrats.” I suspect this is an indication that Krugman hangs out with a wide range of liberal people, but only the most marginal of conservatives. Because it is simply not the truth that Republicans don’t make the case that the parties are the same. Um, is the RINO extinct?

What we’ve seen over the last seven years, if not a lot longer, is that conservative voters are not ideological; they are tribal. This is why Donald Trump is doing so well. These Republicans don’t care about policy, they care about chest thumping. And that is why they think there really is no difference between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Sure, the policies would be quite different. But they would both be standard issue establishment types who would treat the presidency as an office with a history and norms that ought to be followed. They are not, in other words, revolutionaries. (Note: I could make a case that Bush would, in fact, be a revolutionary and that his brother most definitely was.)

This all takes me back to 2011 when I was at the Sonoma County Fair and came upon the local booth for the Republican Party. And the biggest sign they had up was a “No RINO” sign. A RINO, of course, is a “Republican In Name Only.” This was the local GOP establishment and in a fairly liberal area: not just California, but one of the most liberal parts of California. You would think they would be interested in moderate Republicans. But no, they were holding the fort for the conservative revolution coming any day now.

Democrats have an equivalent term: DINO. But it appeared after and in response to RINO. But what it all means is that for Republicans, there really is “no big difference” between the vast majority of their candidates and the Democrats. That’s what purity is all about. This is why the Republican establishment brooks almost no variance from orthodoxy. It’s funny that people talk about how the establishment has lost control of the presidential race. Even the great Republican populist Donald Trump had to put out by far the most regressive tax plan in order to shore up his credentials.

If it appears to Krugman that Republicans don’t fall into the trap of thinking the two parties are the same, it is probably because the Republican Party has been so successful at banishing all RINO from being competitive for major offices. The conservative columnists at The New York Times would never claim that the Democrats and Republicans are the same. But we can’t go by that!

The more pure their party has become, the more paranoid the Republicans are about RINO in their midst. Last September, Free Republic published an article, John Boehner Caught Conspiring With Nancy Pelosi. It’s not a minor outlet. And the article tells us, “Functionally, there is absolutely no difference between Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner.” Clearly, at least one columnist doesn’t get out enough.

And it’s funny that Krugman would think that it is only Democrats who think the parties are the same given that he has been so prominent in the Clinton-Sanders war. But maybe that’s what’s blinding him. He’s so worried about the Sanders supporters that he can’t see the wider reality. But if he thought about it, he’d see that what’s going on is just that the Democratic base is having a fight over whether the party will be liberal or slightly more liberal. Sanders isn’t demanding purity and he surly isn’t saying that Clinton is the same as Bush. And neither are any prominent Sanders supporters. I do wish people would stop basing reality on Twitter and Facebook arguments.

But here’s something that I run into all the time in arguing politics with conservatives. Because I’m pretty knowledgeable about this stuff and I’m not arguing with Greg Mankiw, I destroy conservatives in these arguments. And their fallback is always, “Well, they’re all the same!” When I was a libertarian, and I made my fine tuned arguments against liberals, they never ended by claiming, “Well, they’re all the same!” So among the extremists on both side, you will hear that there is no difference between the parties. But it’s primarily in the Republican Party where you will hear ordinary voters making that claim.

Of course, Democrats have recent history to remind them:

Afterword: Michelle Goldberg and the RINO

Note that Goldberg’s argument here is still largely wrong. This is a video that Democrats need to watch. But pretty much everything she says about Democrats is true of Republicans. It is not “a particular pathology of the left.”

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you probably know that while I have my problems with Vox, I also admire what they do. Some people there, like Max Fisher, are awesome. But even at its core of where it shows off its upper-middle class biases, it still provides reasonably good coverage. So when I see them make a clear conceptual mistake, it disturbs me because I know it is so much worse at The New York Times, much less Fox News. In this case, I’m talking about its debate coverage.

Dylan Matthews wrote one of their typical genre articles of debate coverage, 3 Winners and 2 Losers From Saturday Night’s Republican Debate. These are always interesting, even if I consider them wrong. The three winners were: Jeb Bush, the Democrats, and the moderators; the two losers were: Donald Trump and Marco Rubio. He felt that Rubio lost because he was just okay and he needed to shine. The Democrats won because, “The longer, the bloodier, and the sillier this campaign season is, the better it is for the eventual Democratic nominee.” And the moderators won because they did a reasonably good job.

Debate Coverage: Not Like Music Criticism

Matthews’ argument for Trump being a loser and Bush being s winner, however, are based on the same questionable analysis: the theater audience was clearly with Bush. Think about this from different perspective. You are a classical music critic and you are supposed to review Yoyo No Mas, the great tenor who hasn’t performed in over a decade. He’s performing in his hometown. And everyone loves his performance. But you are a professional and you know Yoyo No Mas has lost it: his rhythm is erratic and he’s flat when he hits high notes. Do you write a glowing review because the clearly biased audience ate it up? I don’t think so.

But that’s what Matthews did. And he isn’t alone. That seems to be the consensus of the debate coverage: Bush did well because, oh, how the audience cheered him and Trump did poorly because he got booed — a lot. Most of the rest of the media firmament may be unaware of the situation. They may actually think that the audience is indicative of South Carolina voters. But the truth is that Trump was right when he said, “That’s Jeb’s special interests and lobbyists talking.” And Matthews knows this! He wrote, ” Apparently only 600 of the 1,600 tickets to the event were given to the candidates, and the state and national party controlled most of the rest.” He added to this, “The result was an enthusiastically pro-Jeb crowd.”

Let’s Repeat the False Narrative!

Now I get this. If I were the Republican Party establishment, I’d do it too. It certainly must have looked to many viewers at home that Jeb Bush had a feisty debate. But why should the media play along? Isn’t it the job of the media to report that Jeb’s new more aggressive stance against Trump is mostly just a matter of stage lighting and make-up? Jeb Bush was only a winner if the debate coverage ignores this fact.

From my vantage point, Jeb Bush was better than he has been. But it’s just as easy to make the same argument about him that Matthews made about Rubio. And to me, every time the audience booed Trump, it made me think how pathetic the Republican establishment is. I suspect that this is even more true of Trump supporters. And it makes Jeb Bush look like exactly the weak guy that Donald Trump has portrayed him as: someone who needs his powerful family and establishment connections to win the race.

What the media need to understand is that they affect the game. A lot more people will see debate coverage than the actual debate. If Jeb Bush really was a winner for those who watched the debate, proclaiming him so only pushes a very fake reality that the Republican Party establishment has created.

Update (15 February 2016 11:07 am)

Check this out, Poll: Rubio Won Republican Debate. The placement from the CBS News overnight poll was this: Rubio, Trump, Kasich, and then Cruz. The Drudge Report readers’ poll had this placement: Trump, Cruz, and then Rubio. Notice anyone who’s missing for these polls? That’s right: Jeb Bush. And according to Dylan Matthews, he was the only Republican in the “win” category.

I hadn’t meant to watch last night’s GOP debate. But it was amazing. I couldn’t turn away. The thing was, it didn’t seem like a debate. It was more like kids throwing mud at each other. But I find this more interesting than the substantive debates that the Democrats have. Now that may be because I already know where the candidates stand on most issues. So I see the debates as being artificial. Republican debates are more like fist fights. And this one was the top of the them all.

But it got me wondering: why do Democrats talk about actual policy whereas we see no such thing at any GOP debate? Part of it surely is that Republicans don’t really have much to offer in terms of policy that they can talk about. If they get into the details of their economic policy, it will be clear that all they care about is giving tax cuts to the rich and allowing companies to send more jobs overseas even while polluting more here at home. They aren’t going to talk about that in a debate.

It’s even worse on foreign policy. Pretty much every Republican has this to say about the subject, “Obama has made us weak! I will make us strong!” But if you burrow down into what their actual policies are, they are the same things that Obama is doing. So what they are really saying is, “I will do exactly what Obama is doing, but I will really mean it!” Once you realize this, you can’t watch a GOP debate without finding it amusing — and horrifying. Kind of like watching Dead Alive.

Why the GOP Debate Was Contentless

There is a more fundamental issue at hand, though. The Republicans have moved about as far to the right as they possibly could. This is why it is interesting that people consider Donald Trump too far out. While it might be true that he is too far out, he is not too far to the right. He never would have caught on if he had gone in that direction because only the billionaire class is interested in that kind of a candidate. There is no doubt to me that Trump is by far the most reasonable candidate in the Republican primary.

So when you get these people together who really don’t disagree on anything they can really talk about publicly, they have nothing to do but sling mud at each other. And it was quite a scene. Mostly, it was just allegations about how the others weren’t the True Conservative™. It was, not surprisingly, like Monty Python:

This is a natural problem in a two party system when one party decides to move distinctly toward the other. And that’s what the Democratic Leadership Council was able to do to the Democratic Party. Now I’ve always thought that fundamentally, those people weren’t interested in the Democrats winning elections, but really just wanted a socially liberal Republican Party. But even if you grant that their real concern was making the Democrats competitive, they won the battles and lost the war.

To start with, winning elections means nothing if it goes along with the entire political environment moving in the opposite direction. And that’s what’s happened. It wasn’t Reagan that moved the entire country to the right; it was Bill Clinton. He was the one who managed to greatly constrain the Overton Window. And as a result of this, the Republicans had two options. They could have jumped over the Democrats and become a complete populist party (and this is more or less what Trump is doing). Or they could move way off to the right. And that’s what they’ve done.

It is funny that every four years, we hear what a “deep bench” the Republicans have. And then they all get out there and there isn’t a deep bench. It’s just a bench of a bunch of guys who all play the same position. There is nothing different about them other than that they have different styles. Last night at the GOP debate, we saw a free-for-all. There was nothing to discuss. There aren’t different conservative policy positions. There is just one and the only question is which one of the candidates will enforce it most rigidly.