I have a particular position on Ben Carson and his appeal in the Republican Party. I’ve had it for a long time — long before he became a front runner. It is all about racism, but not in the way you might think. Everyone is racist to one extent or another. As a species, we are programmed to be afraid of other tribes. And that is really what racism is at its base. So very few people are racists in the way that the people in Mississippi Burning were racists. Very few people think of themselves as racist. Yet their subconscious outs them.

Consider me. I don’t think of myself as a racist. Yet when I took an Implicit Association Test for subconscious bias, my result was, “Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for European American compared to African American.” This is not surprising. I’ve lived in a deeply racist society my entire life. I’ve watched the television news where black men are over represented as criminal suspects. I’ve known almost no African Americans in my life and I have no African American friends. It is not surprising that I have an instinctual preference for white people. But knowing this, I try really hard to fight these lower brain impulses with my higher brain.

What bothers me is that I hear people claim that they are not racists. They treat everyone the same. This is especially true of conservatives. Yet when they take the test, they usually deny that it says anything about them. And that brings us to Ben Carson. He flatters conservatives. They know that they aren’t racists. If only African Americans would act more “white” then there wouldn’t be a problem. This is a common belief that racism is about skin color and not what it actually is: a particular group that skin color is used as a signifier.

So Ben Carson goes before our conservative friends and says, “You aren’t racist, because you like me!” But they wouldn’t like Carson if he didn’t tell them that they are just fine. They aren’t doing well because they are white and they have had a huge cultural and monetary advantage that depends up hundreds of years of slavery and then Jim Crow and then redlining. So Ben Carson doubles their pleasure. First, conservatives are voting for a black man, which must mean they aren’t racists. Second, he denies that they are racists by claiming there are very good (non-racist) reasons for wanting to screw poor and middle class African Americans.

Brian Beutler wrote an interesting article along these lines, The Superficiality of the Republican Commitment to Racial Justice. It’s mostly about tokenism. Republicans think that they don’t have a racism problem between, hey, they have African American candidates! But I was especially struck by what he had to say about Carson:

So yes: Ben Carson is also a racist and would undoubtedly score the same on the Implicit Association Test as I did. But even more than that, the fact that he is black allows him to pander to the racism of Republican voters even more than the white politicians. That’s a nifty trick.

I read a very interesting Chris Dillow article, On Misunderstanding Economics. It is based upon research that shows that people are very confused about how economics work. The most obvious example of this is the idea that the macro-economy is like a household. This is where we get this nonsense from Obama in 2009 when we were still deeply in recession saying, “All across America, families are tightening their belts and making hard choices. Now, Washington must show that same sense of responsibility.” It sounds right, but it is totally wrong. It’s fine for me to tighten my belt when I’m trying to pay down my debt, but when everyone does it — when your spending is my income — it doesn’t work.

In addition to this, people make associations. For example: inflation and unemployment are both bad, so people put the two things together and think there is a correlation. That’s not true, of course; it is generally the opposite. Similarly, they associate government spending with unemployment. Again: exactly the opposite of the way things are. People are deeply confused about economics. And what I’ve noticed in my life is that those who think they understand economics the best are usually the most confused. It is a classic example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.

But it comes as no surprise to me that all of these misunderstandings lead to conservative policy. I think a large part of this is because conservatives run around saying that these things are correlated. For example, for decades, conservatives have claimed that tax cuts for the rich will cause economic growth because the rich will use the extra money to create jobs. They’ve been so successful at this propaganda that they no longer even have to explain why tax cuts for the rich will lead to more jobs. It is just “common sense” that tax cuts for the rich will create jobs.

The issue with government “belt tightening” is a great example. It isn’t hard to make people understand this. If everyone spends less money, everyone will see the amount of money they earn go done. As a result, everyone will have less money to pay their debts. But the debts themselves will not get smaller. Thus, everyone spending less will actually make the debt problem worse. Indeed, we have seen this in a number of EU countries, where they’ve cut their spending savagely, only to end up owning more money relative to their GDPs. This is not hard to understand.

The problem is that the our media infrastructure is totally vested in believing the “common sense” that “families are tightening their belts and making hard choices” so “Washington must show that same sense of responsibility.” No one goes around saying that billiard balls move according to Newton’s laws of classical mechanics so quarks must too. Everyone understands that reasonable sounding analogies don’t necessarily work. Indeed, I don’t know of any economist who claims that the macro-economy acts the way that a household economy does. But conservatives who have a vested interest in pushing bad economic policy are allowed to do so. And that’s the reason that people misunderstand economics.

Cecilia Hyunjung Mo wrote a good article over at The Washington Post, Why Asian Americans Don’t Vote Republican. Her idea is that Asian Americans still feel like foreigners in this country because they are still treated that way, even if they were born in Texas. That’s certainly part of it. And let us not forget that at least in the western United States, Chinese immigrants were the most hated group only a century ago.

But I have a different take on why Asian Americans aren’t keen on the Republican Party. While it is certainly true that Asian Americans are treated as outsiders in their own country, that’s true coming from both political parties. The problem with Asian Americans and the Republican Party is really a broader issue. Republicans have really bad policy ideas. They would not manage to have substantial support throughout the United States if it weren’t for the fact that they push the idea that whites are the “real” Americans and that all those “fake” Americans (Asians, Latinos, blacks) were taking away what was rightly theirs.

This allows the Republican Party to push ideas like tax cuts for the rich and privatizing Social Security. These are not even popular among Republican voters. Yet those voters still side with the Republicans. They vote for the Republicans not because of the explicit policies but because of the implicit message: we are the party that stands with you and against all those invalid Americans who are destroying what is the true nature of America. If you took away this implicit message, very few people would vote for the Republican Party — or at least the Republican Party would have to drastically change the policies that it is pushing.

Many Americans with Asian ancestors may well react against the clear white supremacist nature of the Republican Party. But I don’t think that’s the main thing. There are two things that the Republicans have to offer. First is the pro-white narrative about how they did everything for themselves and didn’t depend upon the abuse of Africans and native peoples and Chinese and Latinos and pretty much every other group you can think of. That clearly isn’t going to appeal to people who don’t see themselves as white. The second thing the Republicans have to offer is policy that further enriches the rich and goes to war whenever possible. That’s a very unpopular set of policies and people only go along with if they are blinded by the first thing the Republicans offer.

The question that the Republicans need to ask of themselves is why it is that all groups who aren’t vested in white resentment avoid them. Perhaps their biggest problem is that over the decades, they’ve created an insular culture that they really think that everyone agrees with them. (“Everyone at my country club is a Republican!”) This leads to their conspiracy theories about how ACORN stole not only the 2008 election, but also the 2012 election, long after the group even existed. Or more generally why there must be wide scale voter fraud because obviously America wanted John McCain and Mitt Romney to be president.

It’s not a secret that the Republican Party is in a bind. If it reaches out to other groups, it is going to lose its base voters. These voters, after all, don’t vote Republican because they really think that the capital gains tax or the estate tax need to be reduced. So how do they signal to Asian Americans that the Republican Party likes them while making white people feel that they are aggrieved by everyone else? I’m not saying they can’t do it. That’s the one thing that Republicans are very good at. But at this point, they don’t even seem to be interested in it.

On Monday, Paul Krugman wrote, Partisan Growth Gaps. It seems that Carly Fiorina claimed that Hillary Clinton flunked economics. Clinton claimed that the economy does better under Democratic presidents than they do under Republicans. Except, as we know from the great Mark Thoma, not only is this true, there are reasons for it. Krugman is much more cautious. But there is no doubt that the economy does do better. The only question is why.

The standard answer that conservatives give is to credit Republicans regardless. Clinton shouldn’t get credit for the economic boom during his presidency. No, it was Ronald Reagan’s policies from 15 years earlier. Ronald Reagan is for conservatives what God is for Christians. If something went wrong under Reagan, it wasn’t his fault. If something went right after he was out of office, then it was thanks to him. Whatever. Conservatives are by and large crazy.

Thoma’s main argument was that Democrats do better with the economy because they care about helping it. Republicans just want to do certain things for ideological reasons. They are going to do them whether it helps or hurts the economy. If the economy is good, they want to cut taxes on the rich. If the economy is bad, they want to cut taxes on the rich. In the end, Republicans always end up costing more money. If the electorate were rational, the Republicans would never win a national election. But you know how it goes.

I want to propose something slightly different. Republicans are committed to policies that increase income inequality. Now when inequality was fairly low, that wasn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world. It wasn’t great under Reagan, but it wasn’t terrible. But since that time, more and more money has gone to the rich and it has just sat around. So policies that reduce income inequality will generally be good for economic growth. Poor people spend the money they get. Rich people go looking for places to invest. But given that there aren’t enough poor people buying stuff, that money looking to invest finds few opportunities.

So I think it is as simple as that: Republicans move money to where it does the least amount of good. Imagine that you have two people at a kitchen table and you are serving food. But you only give food to one of the people. Eventually, she is full. The other diner is not, because he hasn’t gotten any food. But the server just keeps giving food to her, even though she isn’t eating. That’s Republican economic policy. Democrats make sure that the starving guy gets at least some food.

But I’m not surprised that Carly Fiorina would think that she has things to teach Hillary Clinton. For one thing, business people always think they understand macro-economics, even though there is literally no crossover. Running a business is nothing at all like running a country. Add to that that Fiorina was terrible at running her own company. And then add her conservative ideology that claims that the best thing is always to give millionaires like herself ever more money, and you have a recipe for failure. Fiorina is the kind of person who could destroy our economy over four years and walk away still thinking she had done a great job. Just like she did at HP.