I have to admit to being at a loss about the Republican presidential nomination. It does seem hard to believe that Donald Trump would be the nominee. But why do I think that? In a lot of ways, he is the Ross Perot of his day. I don’t mean that they are the same. Perot was an actual issue candidate. That issue — the budget deficit — was wrong; but it was something that intelligent people could disagree about. But they both appealed to people in much the same way: they were self financing and seemed like the kind of people who were willing to tell the people “the truth.” It’s a kind of affinity fraud, or as it is know, “identity politics.”

There are a lot of conservatives who are in love with this idea. Part of it is the delusion that people deserve their wealth. As we all know, Ross Perot’s fortune was highly tied to government largess. And the same thing is true of Donald Trump. See question number 17 of David Cay Johnston’s 21 Questions For Donald Trump. But to the conservative mind, these are self-made men. And without any experience in government, they are expected to walk into the White House and fix all our problems. So I see no reason why Trump can’t manage to take a third of the Republican delegates.

Matt Bruenig wrote an interesting article related to this, The Trump Confidence Game Analysis Has No Basis in Fact. Really, it just comes down to the fact that everyone has predicted that Trump will die out but he’s only grown in support. And I understand this. There is just this gut feeling in me that Trump can’t win, but there is no actual evidence behind it.

I noticed this in a recent Jonathan Bernstein article, Trump Will Still Lose. Here’s How. From the beginning, Bernstein has said that Trump will lose because he is of “the party decides” belief. But I found this most recent article to be hedging more than usual. Maybe there really is something different this time. Maybe it is all just about Trump being a billionaire.

Cruz seems like such an obvious choice, because he is even more vile than Trump, but is savvy enough to know what he can and can’t say regarding the media. But who really cares? Imagine that it is Marco Rubio? We are still talking about a horrible person. And let’s not forget that of these three, Trump is most likely to be the best. He’s not committed to conservative ideology. The other two are. So I imagine that a Trump administration would at least have some pragmatic aspects to it and very likely some absolutely positive policy.

But as Brian Beutler noted, the GOP’s indentity politics may doom Marco Rubio. But he is wrong when it comes to the Democrats. He thinks that the reason that Martin O’Malley hasn’t caught on is because he is too much of a banal white guy. But that isn’t it. I think O’Malley hasn’t caught fire because he doesn’t offer anything especially exciting. Dismissing the Democratic base’s embrace of Sanders (a while male from the Northeast) being because he is a “left-wing insurgent” is self-refuting. The Democratic base is interested in issues, not “types.”

This is something I’ve talked about a lot, but people have a hard time accepting it. The Democrats are not the party of identity politics. African Americans don’t vote for the Democratic Party because it is the African American party. They vote for it because it has done a great deal for the African American community. If there is an identity for the Democratic Party, it is economic uncertainty: poor and working class people vote for the Democratic Party because they think that it looks out for their economic interests.

It is the Republican Party that is all about identity politics. They are, after all, the people who claim to be the “real” Americans. And they very much want to vote for a rich white guy, because we just haven’t had enough of those. So currently, Trump and Cruz look like the clear favorites to win the nomination. Politically, the three are very similar. But Rubio has the problem that he looks just a little bit like he might be ethnic.

That’s what it seems to be about. The Republicans have long ago given up on policy. It is all about personality and identity. And as a result, it is most likely that they will nominate Trump or Cruz. In the end, all they want is some blowhard to talk tough — but one they trust. And that means a white man. It’s funny that the Democratic Party with all its diversity is the one that is seen as the party of identity politics. Is the Democratic Party the African American party? No. Is it the Latino party? No. Is it the woman party? No. But the Republican Party is the white male party. It is the party of identity politics.

Last night, I watched a little bit of the MSNBC coverage of the then upcoming State of the Union address. And what I saw so upset me that I didn’t even watch the event. It was big news yesterday that Iran had captured ten US Navy crew members. So it was time to start demagoguing! And there was Steve Schmidt on “liberal” MSNBC going on (and on and on) about how the president needed to change his speech and talk tough about Iran and under no circumstance should the president tout the Iranian nuclear deal because Iran is bad, bad, bad.

Chris Matthews fired back. He’s not an artful guy, but what he said was basically correct: the Republicans just look for anything to complain about the president, that it was a bad faith criticism, and that Schmidt himself was doing that. Schmidt defended himself by noting that his wife was in the Navy and through a kind of “some of my best friends are military,” claimed that he didn’t just want war.

As I recall, both Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes made the argument that the whole thing was a diplomatic issue and maybe the president would be wrong to politicize it and might put these very service members in jeopardy. All I could think at the time was that this was going to be how it was. It didn’t matter that the president wanted to use the SotU address to call for collaboration, it was all going to be about conservative jerks like Steve Schmidt going around claiming that Obama is weak because he doesn’t rip off his shirt and pound his chest.

At the actual SotU address, Obama went on with his speech as planned. He told the assembled conservative whiners that we had a solid economy, and, “The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth.” And then after the speech, the press was filled with headlines like this one in The Washington Post, Iran Releases Captured US Navy Crew Members. And there was this in The New York Times, Iran’s Swift Release of US Sailors Hailed as a Sign of Warmer Relations. Oh! So contrary to Steven Schmidt, it’s actually things like the Iran nuclear deal and the fact that Obama believes in diplomacy that made this whole thing a non-issue, except for the conservative ranters who are only interested in finding fault with the president because he happens to be a Democrat.

Now you might say that this is much ado about nothing. And that’s true in an absolute sense. It’s just that it is always true. What Steve Schmidt was really saying was that he doesn’t like the Iran nuclear deal, and he doesn’t like it because he doesn’t like the president, and he doesn’t like the president because he’s a conservative hack. Of course, what seems to have been lost in all of this is that it was actually America that was at fault. What Iran did is what we would have done in that circumstance. But any excuse for more whining from conservatives.

What exactly Steve Schmidt is doing on television is unclear to me. If he had been more successful, we would have President McCain, be at war with Iran right now, and have Sarah Palin embarrassing us all over the world. Someone on Twitter last night said that he should be on Fox News, but I countered that. Say what you will about Fox News, at least the people on it are interesting. Steve Schmidt is on MSNBC because the network is desperate to have some kind of conservative who can breath through his nose to sort of counter Rachel Maddow. I hope Schmidt realizes just how much he benefits from affirmative action.

As I was getting ready to leave town Monday morning, I saw that Chris Hughes had decided to sell New Republic. It’s interesting to me because I was harsh in my criticism of the late 2014 resignation debacle. I first wrote, New Republic: 1914 – 2014. And then later, Attack of the Crybaby: Why Chris Hughes Turned Against New Republic. It is this latter one that I find myself thinking about now. What exactly was Chris Hughes thinking all this time.

I don’t think that what happened is opened to debate. Hughes started by thinking it would be fun to own a magazine. He had a great time hanging out with really accomplished, sophisticated people who had earned their reputations at the top of the liberal publishing pyramid. It must have been heady for Hughes, because let’s not forget: all Hughes did was happen to be Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate. That’s it. There’s no doubt that he’s smart enough, but he isn’t even at Zuckerberg’s level, and that level is low itself.

But after hanging out with the cool kids for a couple of years, Hughes got bored with it. After all, people like Jeet Heer were little more than celebrities to Hughes. And the truth is to them, Hughes was probably just a rich kid who owed his position to luck. They appreciated the money, but that was as far as it went. So given that New Republic was no longer fun, Hughes had to come up with a reason to have bought it — something to save face. So he came up with the idea he would revolutionize publishing.

The problem was that Hughes couldn’t revolutionize anything — the best he could hope for is to be the roommate of someone who might revolutionize publishing. And that wasn’t going to happen. But even if he had been a genius, he didn’t understand the publishing industry. So he was destined to fail regardless. And so that led to his letter Monday where he announced that he was selling New Republic because of the question he can’t answer, “Can it find a sustainable business model that will power its journalism in the decades to come?”

Well, it’s going to be pretty hard to sell New Republic as anything but a brand name that someone might want to take on. Thirteen months ago, it employed a great staff of writers and editors. Now they are mostly distributed throughout the publishing industry. Now I pretty much only follow Brian Beutler and to a lesser extent Elizabeth Stoker. I don’t see who is going to be all that interested in buying Chris Hughes’ plaything now that he’s broken it.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo made a great point about the constraints of running a news organization within a budget. That was something that Hughes had no interest in. The idea of managing New Republic better doesn’t seem to have ever occurred to him. Instead, he blew $20 million in four years. His idea seems to have been that he could use the power of the internet to turn the magazine into something really special. But of course, there are already millions of people on the internet trying to do that.

A lot of people are talking about the old New Republic business model: modest financial losses made up for with donations from rich donors. Certainly that is what I thought Chris Hughes was going to do when he first bought the magazine. But he’s turned out to be far more immature than that. He never had a plan. He never tried to make the magazine efficient. He just tried to have fun. And when he was done, he tried to say face.

His legacy will be that he destroyed the magazine. There really is no point in it continuing on. But of course, it will continue on — just like Netscape continues on. But what it shows is that it is dangerous to have really rich people around. Hughes is like Bill and Melinda Gates. They are all people who think that because they are wealthy, they must be smart and able to fix difficult problems. And because they can throw around a lot of money, there are always lots of people around to tell them they are right. But now that Hughes isn’t having fun and everyone is laughing at him for being incompetent, he’s giving up and going out looking for something else to have fun with. After the Gates Foundation manages to finish all its education “reforms” only to find that they’ve made things worse, the Gates will find something else that they don’t understand to help “fix.”

No one should care that New Republic is dying. But we should care very much that our excessive income inequality allows rich fools to destroy venerable institutions because they think their money makes them smart.