Live from the Roasterie: The highly-estimable Kevin Drum comes down on the side of a vulgar Marxist explanation of right-wing Republican crankery. The problem, however, is that I don’t think it works — anti-ObamaCare crankery, for example, hits a great many rich cardiologists and such in the pocket book, albeit in an indirect and somewhat hidden way. And goldbuggery — it’s a way of transferring money from rich people to con artists. You have to have a theory not just of why rich people are so eager to try to protect their money but why they are so unable to understand how to do so, and why they are so easy prey for grifters like Ron Paul and company… Kevin Drum (2015): A Unified Theory of Conservative Crankery Isn’t So Hard: “Tax-cut fever… inflation paranoia… …Supply-side tax nonsense is obviously driven by the desires of rich people. And I think inflation paranoia comes from the same place. It’s a bit of a mystery why rich people are so worried about inflation, but they are. Other subjects are similar. The claim that global warming is a hoax is obviously driven by the desire not to address global warming, which would require offending the interests of lots of rich business donors. Anti-evolution crankery is a little different, but it’s basically harmless and it doesn’t offend powerful interests, so there’s no reason not to play along with it. There are other bits of crankery here and there that are driven by base politics, but in the end, the versions of conservative crankery that really matter nearly always come down to pandering to the rich at all costs — or, at the very least, doing nothing to offend them. Whatever else you can say about the Republican Party, it knows who’s in charge and it always has. This is starting to create some seismic faults that are likely to cause them a lot of angst in the near future, but for now, it’s the wealthy uber alles.

Originally published on bradford-delong.com