A few minutes before class, and I’m thinking about the plight of not-crazy conservatives. I have macroeconomics in mind at the moment, but it’s not a unique issue.

If you think about policy in general, it involves two kinds of decisions: values and models, or what you want and what you believe. There aren’t totally independent, but people should be able to make a distinction. And in that space there is room for legitimate argument. You can, for example, want a strong welfare state that does a lot of redistribution, or not; meanwhile, there is a range of defensible views about, say, the effectiveness of monetary policy or the incentive effects of taxes.

But not all views about how the world works are defensible. And here’s the thing: in modern US politics, trying to side with people who want a smaller welfare state means siding with people who insist on believing things that aren’t true. Think of it as a matrix:

Photo

There have been people on the left who make claims about how the economy works that are radically at odds with the evidence — but it’s hard to find such people in America these days, and they certainly have no influence on the Democratic Party. On the other side, there are “reformicons” who try to more or less talk sense about the economy (more or less because market monetarism has big problems); but they are a tiny group of intellectuals with little influence on a Republican Party that gets its economics from Art Laffer and Ayn Rand.

The reformicons like to imagine that one day they’ll win over the party that reflects their values, and in the long run maybe that will happen. But for now, and my guess is for decades to come, they have no political home — unless they wake up and realize that they aren’t actually Republicans in the modern sense.