Henry Farrell wrote a great article at Crooked Timber on Wednesday, A Brief Theory of Very Serious People. He argued that what’s really going on with Very Serious People (VSP) is a kind of group think. And this is made pernicious because the VSP exist in a media framework that takes what they say as always being right and so magnifies their biases. But I think there is a touch of question begging here. Why is it that a media framework exists that allows this? And I think the answer to that is that the VSP are the basis of the liberal class: the apologists for the power elite — the great bulwark against revolution.

All you have to see is that the VSP just so happen to always be pushing the interests of the power elite. This is how we get the likes of William Saletan, who considers himself to be a “centrist.” But this supposed centrism consists of economic conservatism and social liberalism — the very opposite of populism. And his opinions are not moderate; they are instead rather extreme in both areas. He is neither a centrist on economic nor social issues. It’s like saying a hardwood box is soft because the inside in empty; in point of fact, if you banged your head on the box, you would see that it is not soft.

Now I can’t say if the VSP hold these opinions explicitly to curry favor with the power elite. Because the truth is that the interests of the VSP and the power elite are the same. In many — perhaps even most — cases, the VSP are the power elite. But the way this works is very clear. The VSP are in favor of cutting Social Security, because they plan to work at their cushy jobs well into their 70s. They are in favor of keeping taxes low, because they “make” a lot of money. They are in favor of education “reform,” because they send their kids to private schools. What’s more, they have friends who work in the “reform” movement. They aren’t too keen on the minimum wage, because they don’t know anyone who makes that little. But they do have friends in the LGBT community, so they are in favor of equal rights for them. People of their class know how an unplanned pregnancy can ruin a life, so they support reproductive rights.

Usually, the VSP make the most tired of arguments. They are some of the biggest supporters of conventional wisdom. But not always. The VSP love to push counter-intuitive ideas — but only when those ideas help the power elite. Raising the minimum wage might seem like it would help the poor, but they argue that it won’t. They argue this because of a collection of ideas from free market dogma, which might apply if we actually had a free market. But the VSP never get to the end of that reasoning chain, because the moment they get to a conclusion that helps the rich and tells the poor to shut up, the VPS know they are done.

But most of all, the VSP love “tough decisions.” They love to push the ideas that cause a lot of pain in society because they think it makes them seem strong. Of course, making a tough decision is one that ought to be applied to oneself. But the supposed tough decisions of the VSP only result in pain for people well removed from them. It is not tough for me to decide that Khalid Bin Mohsen Shaari ought to lose some weight. It is a tough decision for me to go out and run each night rather than sit at home and watch reruns of Arrested Development.

And this, I think, is what really matters about the VSP: they actually think that they are serious. They are so unplugged from the real world, that they think that reducing inflation by throwing 10 million people they don’t know out of work is a sign of how seriously they take policy. But the actual work that VSP are expected to do is things like arguing to keep inflation down, because that’s what the rich want. So when they make such “tough” decisions, they are not pushing against expectations. They are instead doing what is expected and therefore easy. And that is why they transcend being simply wrong and move on to being some of the most offensive (Very Serious) people on the planet.

Medicare is hated by conservative elites. And it was hated long before it even existed. In 1961, Ronald Reagan said, “We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” He was talking about what would become Medicare. It’s silly in a way, but also callous and hateful. Now, of course, conservative elites have a problem because the one group that consistantly votes for conservative candidates is totally dependent upon Medicare. They mostly have sunset years because of the medical care that Medicare provides. Although I will admit that many of them do spend a lot of time telling young people about how great things used to be.

The truth is that Medicare has a problem: it costs a lot. This fact is often used by conservatives to claim that Social Security is not sustainable. It’s nonsense, but fundamentally Medicare is not sustainable. But it is true that Medicare is not sustainable. This is because we pay about twice as much for the same medical care as people in other advanced countries like Canada, France, Germany, and Japan. Medical inflation seems to be slowing down. But if things don’t improve, no one will be able to afford healthcare in America. Now that’s an issue of freedom that Reagan ought to have been worried about.

But conservatives are not interested in dealing with Medicare problems reasonably. The truth is that the elderly would just be squeezed out of the private insurance market. And the one thing that would have any chance at all of stopping that would be Obamacare, which conservatives also want to destroy. There isn’t a lot of honest discussion about healthcare on the right. Conservatives just want to destroy any system that will actually cover people. And to be honest, I’m not sure why this is. It seems to be some kind of ideological gut reaction that is not based on anything rational.

Now the most “reasonable” man running for the Republican presidential nomination is Jeb Bush. And I just read in Think Progress, Jeb Bush Quietly Suggests “Phasing Out” Medicare. And it’s the same old thing: let’s keep Medicare for those who now have it but then get rid of it for those who will soon need it as much or more. Or to put it more bluntly: let’s keep Medicare for the people who currently vote Republican and screw over everyone else.

This is always phrased as something that we must do for fiscal reasons. We just can’t afford to fund Medicare! But there are two big things wrong with this. First is just that the costs are not going away. Older people will still need medical care. So the question is only and forever who is going to pay. Second is that benefits determine taxes. There is this bizarre idea that many politicians and pundits have that somehow you could get rid of Social Security benefits but just keep on collecting those payroll taxes.

Ideology trumps everything in the conservative movement. They don’t like Medicare because it is “socialized medicine.” That doesn’t mean that they actually know what socialized medicine is. (Medicare is actually socialized insurance, not socialized medicine.) It is just a conservative bogeyman. But the press really needs to do a better job of covering this stuff. Bush needs to be asked what he thinks should be done to help the elderly who won’t get Medicare. I know what Bush actually thinks: nothing. But it would at least be fun to hear him say what I know he would: buying insurance across state lines; tort reform; high deductible plans — the usual conservative answers to every healthcare problems that would, in fact, do little if anything to address the problems.

Update (24 July 2015 10:33 am)

I didn’t realize just how much Medicare spending had leveled off. This is from Paul Krugman. It shows that per patient Medicare costs in inflation adjusted dollars have stopped growing. Amazing.

New York state has decided to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2021. But only for fast food workers. I don’t begrudge these workers this proposed much deserved raise. But this is not the right way to do this. It is further limited to fast food chains that have at least 30 restaurants in the state. But that too misses the point. This isn’t about soaking the rich. This is about making the economy slightly more fair. People can’t live on the minimum wage. And that means that businesses that are dependent upon the minimum wage are free riders; they aren’t efficient and should either become so or get out of the economy.

But more than this, what’s so special about fast food workers? Are the workers at Walmart any less oppressed? I suspect that the real reason is that the fast food industry doesn’t lobby as well. Given that it is mostly based on franchising, it is easier to push around. But raising the minimum wage throughout the state would likely upset Andrew Cuomo’s core constituency: Wall Street. And we can’t have that. Or at least Cuomo wouldn’t let us have that.

Now we hear lots of happy talk about raising the fast food worker minimum wage putting upward pressure on other wages. That’s no doubt true. But it doesn’t put that much pressure on them. And you know what would be a whole lot of upward pressure on them: raising the minimum wage across the board. This strikes me as the same old thing of the government doing as little as it can to get one particular constituency off its back. But there really is no justification for limiting this move to a particular industry.

Of course, it is hardly certain that this will become law. This may be just another case where Cuomo does something publicly to look good to Democrats, and works behind the scenes to kill it. It is sure to be challenged in court, and the courts have a long history of siding with business — finding all kinds of rights for them, even while workers seem to lack even the most basic rights. We will see. This seems to be a pretty strange policy, and one that can easily be argued is unfairly targeting a particular industry.

But I’m most concerned about what will happen to labor law more generally. Having an endless variety of minimum wages — based upon the industry and the job — will be the same as having no minimum wage at all. Clearly, this is more an indication of our totally screwed up economy. The minimum wage is supposed to be about, well, the minimum: the absolute lowest that anyone should be allowed to work. And I do think that this level should be $15 per hour. But all this is going to do is bring up the wages of some workers. And this will definitely happen: fast food workers will start to be more white and male.

Don’t get me wrong. On balance, this is a good thing. Hopefully, it will make everyone see that we can live with a $15 minimum wage and it will be extended everywhere. But this is a cowardly way to go. And one that may not work out that well.

I remember back when Glenn Beck was a big star with his hugely successful Fox News show. At the time, my father’s girlfriend was dying, and she was addicted to the show. It was obvious that there was a religious aspect to it. She tuned in each day and it was like a gnostic experience to her. She turned on the television, and Glenn Beck revealed secret knowledge to her. He put her entire life’s experiences into a narrative that explained everything. It was a sad end to what had been a fairly interesting life, which included many years going all over the world in a little sail boat.

What makes it most pathetic is that while Beck was a great showman, he had almost nothing with regard to content. He made a great deal out of insights that were not only obvious but meaningless. It was much like watching a child who realizes that “history” has the word “story” in it. While it is true, it also doesn’t tell us much about the word or the world. But Beck was so good at saying it like it meant something, it isn’t surprising that people were fooled. His whole shtick is that any bit of information is just the visible part of the iceberg.

The best example of this was what appeared to be news to him: that Nazism was actually “National Socialism.” This was usually presented very much as Jon Stewart presented him — with intense emotion to the point of stammering. This meant that the actual thing that was terrible about Nazism was that it was a socialist form of government. That wasn’t even true once the Nazis were in power. And this was a major conflict that Joseph Goebbels had — that he felt that Hitler and the Nazi leadership had abandoned that aspect of their movement. Goebbels was a true believer who didn’t understand that it was always and forever about power and only power. (Not that Goebbels wasn’t a truly vile person.)

But it is a curious aspect of conservatives to be so hung up on trivialities. I can call myself George Clooney, but that doesn’t make me attractive. Ideas don’t seem to matter. If my father’s girlfriend appreciated Beck as a gnostic, it is just as true that Beck himself is a gnostic. He has certain set ideas about the world, and by God he is going to find that secret knowledge to prove it. But what’s remarkable is that Beck is hardly alone. There as so many conservatives who seem to be smarter who don’t look any deeper.

A great example of this came out on Monday at National Review — William F Buckley must be fidgety in his grave. Kevin D Williamson wrote, Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism. He noted, “In the Bernieverse, there’s a whole lot of nationalism mixed up in the socialism. He is, in fact, leading a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the Holocaust.”

Forget that it is normally the left in other countries, and not the right, that most drapes itself in the flag. Because, you know: Nazism was National Socialism. That’s all that matters. Therefore, if you can call someone a nationalist and a socialist, then you must be calling them a Nazi. In other words: the extent of Williamson’s understand of Nazism is found in the term “National Socialism.” It’s shocking.

But of course, as usual for a conservative, Williamson isn’t interested in making any kind of point. He’s acting like a naughty boy at the back of the class who’s laughing about the spitballs he is launching at the teacher. Or perhaps better would be Beavis and Butt-head, “Ha ha! I called the liberal Jew a Nazi! Ha ha!” Pretty pathetic from a publication formed for the express purpose of giving the conservative movement a little intellectual heft.

But this is what conservatism is in modern America. It isn’t serious. It isn’t smart. It is, more than anything, a kind of identity politics where we are good and they are bad — by definition. Nothing else needs to be discussed. There are serious conservatives out there who do balk at this nonsense. But it is a vanishingly small part of the movement. And I can’t help but think that they only continue to call themselves conservative out of habit.