Simon Wren-Lewis wrote a great article today, The Imaginary World of Small State People. It is about this conservative notion that because they want a small government just for the sake of having a small government, liberals must want a big government just for the sake of having a big government. According to Wren-Lewis, there was a time when there were people on the left (in Europe anyway) who wanted a large government for its own sake. I’m not sure such people have ever much existed here in the United States — except for the explicit communists, who have never been a large enough group to think much of.

What definitely is true is that for my entire life, people on the left have been in favor of making “a more perfect union” by whatever means works. And that makes people on the left simple pragmatists. Maybe that is a problem. Maybe that’s why we were so susceptible to the con that was the New Democrats. One thing is for sure: the right is highly ideological and without an ideology to counter that, we are toothless in a turf war. If you have people who argue that the government should be destroyed on one side, and people who think the government should be whatever size is reasonable on the other, it should not be surprising that you end up with a government that is far too small.

There is another aspect of Wren-Lewis’ article that I disagree with. I don’t think that conservatives actually want a small government. They certain say that they want one. But when it comes to big government in the military, policing, and the bedroom, they seem to think the bigger the better. And let’s not forget that it just doesn’t cost that much money to feed poor people. You can serve up a whole lot of meals for the cost of a single roughly $100 million F-35.

But Wren-Lewis is dead on about the rhetoric of the small government conservatives. He correctly noted that most people really don’t care about the size of the government as an end in itself. (This includes many conservative voters.) He puts forth four problems he has with the small government types, but they are really all the same: the small government people are disingenuous. They don’t look at proposals on the merits because they are blinded by ideology. And they don’t look at evidence, because when you have an ideology, you don’t need no stinking evidence.

More concerning is the way that conservatives try to convince everyone that their policies work through pure force of will. Wren-Lewis quoted Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and political commentator Janan Ganesh claiming that the liberals are going to lose big-time now that everyone sees that their austerity plans didn’t hurt the way everyone said they would. Except, no. Austerity in the United Kingdom since 2010 could easily have cut GDP by 5%. And cuts to social programs have inflicted enormous pain on the poorer classes.

I think Wren-Lewis gets the reasons why the small government cheerleaders don’t see the problem:

What bothers me is that there is some sense to what the conservatives are doing. Eventually, economies do heal — even ones that are totally mismanaged. So if the George Osbornes of the world (like Margaret Thatcher before them) can just hold out long enough and avoid admitting that they have inflicted great pain in the name of hurting the macroeconomy even more, they can be rewarded. And I have no idea how you defend against this, other than to wait for the rich to so thoroughly destroy the social contract that the poorer classes start to push back.

Robert Reich has an annoying habit of claiming that education really is the ticket up the social ladder. It just isn’t the case. Consider Mark Zuckerberg. He wasn’t some poor kid who networked with the elites at Harvard and clawed his way to the top. Both his parents were highly paid professionals — certainly well inside the upper class. And then Zuckerberg didn’t even graduate. Or what about Daymond John? He had no college education. I realize that these are just single instances, the data on it is shockingly inconsistent. And the question is no longer, “Does a college education raise you up?” It is now, “Does the cost of the education pay for itself over the course of your working life?” On that issue the answer seems to be: probably. That isn’t anything close to what a college education would do for you in the 1970s.

But apart from this little affliction of Reich’s, he’s right about the problems with our educational system, How a Wealthy California Town Makes Sure No Poor Kids Attend Its “Public” School. In the article, he discusses the town of Orinda, which is very wealthy and so has a really well funded public school system. This is the number one thing that is wrong with our educational system: we give the rich far more money to educate their kids than we give to the poor. That’s real “equality of opportunity” for you!

To give you some idea of the inequality here, all the schools in Orinda, 94% white or Asian, get a perfect score of 10 on the GreatSchools rating system. Twenty miles away in Bay Point, a majority Latino town, the grammar schools get ratings of 2 to 4 points. Equality of opportunity! Equality of opportunity! Hooray! But that’s not all. The Orinda school district uses part of its torrent of cash to pay private investigators to make sure that the children in Orinda schools really live in Orinda. This is the public school equivalent of a gated community. For the rest of this article, just inject “Equality of opportunity!” after every sentence.

Reich highlights one such student: Vivian a seven-year-old Latina. Her technical address is in Bay Point of the Awful Schools. But she lives with her mother in Orinda during the week. Her mother is a live-in nanny for a rich couple in Orinda. And Vivian has her own bedroom. On weekends, they both live with the grandmother in Bay Point. So it is clear that the Orinda school district is using whatever means is necessary to get rid of the Latina interloper.

The article was written a week before the school was set to throw out Vivian. And as expected, the school did exactly that. But the whole thing blew up in the Bay Area news. So a day later, the school district reversed course. But what’s interesting here is that previous to this whole thing, the school denied Vivian a free school lunch because they said that she was an Orinda resident. So I guess the idea here was just to “Get the Latina!” at all costs.

But my main interest here is not about this particular student and this particular school. It is the broader issue that we have an incredibly unequal educational system. Some of our public schools are the best in the world. And others are right at the bottom. What’s more, the resources are being used poorly. The children at the bad schools are the ones who need the greatest help. But this is entirely typical of this country: aflict the aflicted and comfort the comfortable. I wonder when Billie and Mindy are going to start caring about this issue. My guess is: never.

See also: Education Reform Billie and Mindy Can’t Abide

I’ve long wondered about the conservative addiction to shutting down the government. I get the fact that they hate the government, even though they are actually for bigger government than liberals. (They are remarkably good at defining as “government” only those things — usually the least expensive things — that they don’t like.) But given that shutting down the government always goes poorly for them, I’ve wondered why they continue to do it. In general, I’ve been of the opinion that they do it because they just can’t help themselves. It’s a form of irrational exuberance for them.

Jonathan Bernstein has a much more plausible theory, Ted Cruz’s Shutdown Trap — for Republicans. It’s brilliantly simple: the Republicans need to shut down the government in order to differentiate themselves. This folds perfectly into something I talk about a lot: the fact that the Republican Party at the Federal level is pretty much monolithic. The range of beliefs among Republican elites is extremely limited. So in order to differentiate themselves, they have to have events like a government shutdown where people like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner will be shown to be RINOs just because they aren’t crazy.

Most of the Very Serious Pundits would have us believe that the Republican “establishment” beat the Tea Party elements into submission during this electoral cycle and that’s why the party did so well. But it has been apparent for a very long time that there really is no substantive difference between the two factions. In fact, that was always the hilarious (and terrifying) thing about the Tea Party. It was made up of a bunch of middle class people who were “mad as hell!” And their solution just happened to integrate perfectly with the interests of the elites. This is, interestingly, exactly what happened to Howard Beale in the film Network: the corporate elites were able to funnel his progressive rage into sad acquiescence about the fact that money is now God.

But just because the pundit class has been tricked into thinking that there is some huge divide in the Republican Party doesn’t mean that the party itself is fooled. Greg Sargent wrote about the plan yesterday morning, Ted Cruz’s Brilliant Strategy to Help Ted Cruz. Basically, there is no strategy and not even any thought as to what the end game will be. But Bernstein explained why this works out well for more than just Ted Cruz:

I’m developing a new theory. As you may know, my Grand Unified Theory of How Everything Got So Messed Up is that the New Democrats pushed to the right and the Republicans had no place to go but crazy-town. But a corollary of this may be that when all the Republicans got bunched up at the “as extreme as you can get without being a Nazi” edge, the Republicans had to break out into areas beyond policy. Hence shooting copies of Obamacare. Hence national debt as slavery. Hence suing the president, impeaching the president, and shutting down the government.

This would all be funny as hell if there weren’t real impacts on millions of real lives. And what’s terrible is that although these kinds of stunts don’t necessarily work to help Republicans (although they often do), they never hurt them in the long run. People were angry about the Republicans shutting down the government a year ago. But by this November, they had forgotten about it and didn’t even show up to vote. Somehow, I’ve got to get past all this and just enjoy the show. Because it is coming. And soon.

There’s nothing quite like listening to two New Democrats complain about exactly how much is the right amount to sell out the liberal movement. Today, the battle was between John Breaux and Ed Kilgore. It all started with a Molly Ball article about Mary Landrieu, The Last Southern Democrat. In it, Ball asked one of those dreary and stupid questions about “what happened” to the Democrats on 4 November. Landrieu didn’t want to answer the question, but former Senator Breaux did, “The perception now is that the Democratic Party is too far to the left and the Republican Party is too far for the right. The majority of Americans are somewhere in the middle.”

This statement is true, but not in the way that Breux thinks it is. Americans are socially conservative and economically liberal. And when you ask them about specific policies, the American people come down decidedly with the Democratic Party. That ought to make Democrats think that the party needs to get a whole lot better at messaging — not that it should move to the right politically. But Breux wants to start up the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) again. And what that means is that he thinks that the Democrats should move to the right on exactly the economic issues where the American people are generally to the left of it.

Ed Kilgore is not happy to hear this, even though he used to work at the DLC. His complaint is that unlike the real New Democrats, Breux and his ilk never believed in the philosophy and were only interested in making whatever deals they could with the Republicans. That would be a good point to make if the principles of the DLC were not so toxic. After all, their primary interest was to remove economic liberalism as a choice from either major American political party. And ultimately, it was razor-focused on winning elections regardless of its effect on actual policy. As I’ve argued many times before, the Republicans won when Clinton became president.

What the DLC always stood for was winning elections. And their way to do that was to pander to the oligarchs. But they couldn’t just become the Republican Party. They had to maintain the brand of liberalism. So they held onto civil rights (as long as it didn’t cost the rich any money) and abortion rights (as long as it didn’t cost the rich any money) and gay rights (as long as it didn’t cost the rich any money). So it is hardly strange that Breux is obsessively pushing the Democratic Party to the right — that’s what a New Democrat is always for.

It’s funny, of course, that Breux can’t see that Obama is exactly a New Democrat — pretty much indistinguishable from Bill Clinton except for the tail chasing and the skin color. What’s really happened is that Kilgore has ossified as a member of the early DLC. Thus, he still believes in many forms of liberalism. But Breaux is actually the more true to the movement. After all, the DLC was only in favor of given policies at any particular time. The overall philosophy was: ever to the right!

If there is a difference between the Kilgore style DLC and the Breux style DLC, it is that the latter is just stupid. If you are willing to move to the right for political gain, you have to do it strategically. John Breux is like many a southern Democrat who abandoned the party during the years of Bush the Younger. But let’s not kid ourselves: the DLC has done terrible harm to liberalism generally and the Democratic Party specifically. And it did absolutely nothing to get Democrats elected. Democrats would have won in 1992, 2000, and 2008 regardless. Kilgore’s embrace of the DLC can be attributed to youthful idiocy. Breux’s embrace of always moving to the right can be attributed to lifelong idiocy. But the DLC was terrible for the country, regardless of whose philosophy of selling out liberalism was followed.

There are a lot of people at New Republic who I really like. In particular: Brian Beutler and Jonathan Cohn. But as a going concern, New Republic generally means one thing to me: a supposedly liberal magazine that is most concerned with attacking liberalism. Most of all, I associate it with its darkest years under the editorial leadership of Andrew Sullivan. This was when it pushed not only Betsy McCaughey’s hit job against the Clinton administration’s healthcare reform law, but also The Bell Curve.

This is what made the phrase “Even The New Republic…” so pernicious. Conservatives could and did say things like, “Even The New Republic thinks that economic inequality doesn’t matter because minority groups are just stupid!” (For those who don’t remember, that was the argument of The Bell Curve — although stated less bluntly.) Back in 2004, Steve Rendall and Anne Kosseff at FAIR described the magazine’s abandonment of its progressive roots since the early 1970s, Not Even the New Republic. In fact, it included a great quote from Hendrik Hertzberg, “The old ‘even The New Republic…’ scam was getting a little old in the 1980s; now it’s a quarter of a century old.”

As a result of this, I have a hard time getting too excited by the news that Chris Hughes has decided to destroy New Republic and turn it into a “digital media company” — think: BuzzFeed. The news, however, is both funny and sad. It is funny in that billionaire man-child Hughes has decided to do this. After all, why did he buy the magazine in the first place? He could have started his own stupid “also ran” digital media company. The whole thing is entirely typical of the useless rich. They like the idea of buying a magazine with a storied past, but they are soon bored and decide to “update” it and make it profitable. According to Jonathan Chait, the magazine has never been profitable and Hughes must have known that when he bought it.

The news is sad because many great writers have now quit BuzzFeed--. (That’s a programming joke!) This includes Jonathan Cohn and Noam Scheiber. The truth is that over the last few years, New Republic really has gotten a lot better. And now this is all gone. And I don’t have any convenient place to check out what Alec MacGillis and Julia Ioffe are writing. But I’m sure they will all still be around and I will find them.

The question is whether this is actually worse than Martin Peretz’s purchase of the magazine in 1974 or the beginning of Andrew Sullivan’s editorship in 1991. And there is potentially a huge upside here. I suspect this will be a huge failure. New Republic will muddle along for many years to come. But it is for all intents and purposes dead. No one is going to step up in a decade and say, “I want to take this mediocre ‘digital media company’ and turn it back into the important magazine it once was!” Instead, one day in the not so distant future, Chris Hughes will have had his fun and will be beyond caring what everyone is saying about him, and he will quietly abandon the project.

There is an important lesson in all of this. The rich are not the saviors of our culture. When they rush in to save institutions like New Republic, they do it as a form of self-aggrandizement. Our only hope is that we create a more equal society. But at this point, it wouldn’t make me sad if Chris Hughes was killed in an auto accident.