I’m beginning to wonder if Weekly Standard editor William Kristol is becoming a parody of himself, driven by his remarkable record of faulty predictions to make wilder and wilder forays into foolish speculation. The latest exhibit is a column suggesting that the 2016 Republican presidential field just isn’t large enough. Seriously, I guess:

[W]hat if come October all we have is Bushies lacking all conviction, Trumpers full of passionate intensity, and a bunch of uninspiring also-rans? I devoutly hope this isn’t the case. But what if it is?

Shouldn’t Republicans be open to doing what Democrats are now considering? That is: Welcoming into the race, even drafting into the race if need be, one or two new and potentially superior candidates? After all, if a new candidate or new candidates didn’t take off, the party would be no worse off, and someone from the current field would prevail. If the October surprise candidate caught fire, it would be all the better for the GOP—whether he ultimately prevailed or forced one of the existing candidates to up his game.

Who could such a mysterious dark horse be? Well, it’s not as if every well-qualified contender is already on the field. Mitch Daniels was probably the most successful Republican governor of recent times, with federal executive experience to boot. Paul Ryan is the intellectual leader of Republicans in the House of Representatives, with national campaign experience. The House also features young but tested leaders like Jim Jordan, Trey Gowdy and Mike Pompeo. There is the leading elected representative of the 9/11 generation who has also been a very impressive freshman senator, Tom Cotton. There could be a saner and sounder version of Trump—another businessman who hasn’t held electoral office. And there are distinguished conservative leaders from outside politics; Justice Samuel Alito and General (ret.) Jack Keane come to mind.

Alito for president? Alito for president?

Surely, Kristol’s looking to expand the field to an extent where anything’s possible, up to and including a Kristol candidacy. Or why not just draft a certain former two-term vice president of the United States who is available? And I’m not talking about Poppy Bush.

While Donald Trump has had us all mesmerized, and we’ve also watched former co-front-runners Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio lose some altitude, and Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina get their fifteen minutes of fame before voters and the media get a closer look at them, it could be that Ted Cruz has been making a move on a key constituency group with a lot of choices. On Friday night in Des Moines, Cruz put on quite the extravaganza for Christian Right activists who simultaneously want to show their wrathful power to the ungodly by smiting Planned Parenthood and whine and cower at their alleged persecution by The Homosexual Agenda. Here’s Matthew Patane’s take for the Des Moines Register:

In his opening remarks during the “Rally for Religious Liberty,” Cruz referenced a number of Supreme Court cases regarding religious issues that came down to a 5-4 decision.

“You want to know what this election is about? We are one justice away from the Supreme Court saying ‘every image of God shall be torn down,’” said Cruz, a U.S. senator from Texas said.

The Cruz campaign invited multiple individuals that it said were “victimized by government persecution” for standing by their religious beliefs.

Oh yes. Cruz brought on stage the Bakers of Conscience, the homophobic Atlanta fire chief, all the mythic figures in the ongoing martyrdom of conservative evangelicals who will nonetheless Take Back Their Country next year.

But there’s an even bigger sign of Cruz’s ascendancy with this constituency, per WaPo’s Katie
Zezima and Tom Hamburger:

Sen. Ted Cruz, who has assiduously courted evangelicals throughout his presidential run, will take a lead role in the launch this week of an ambitious 50-state campaign to end taxpayer support for Planned Parenthood — a move that is likely to give the GOP candidate a major primary-season boost in the fierce battle for social-conservative and evangelical voters.

More than 100,000 pastors received e-mail invitations over the weekend to participate in conference calls with Cruz on Tuesday in which they will learn details of the plan to mobilize churchgoers in every congressional district beginning Aug. 30. The requests were sent on the heels of the Texas Republican’s “Rally for Religious Liberty,” which drew 2,500 people to a Des Moines ballroom Friday.

“The recent exposure of Planned Parenthood’s barbaric practices . . . has brought about a pressing need to end taxpayer support of this institution,” Cruz said in the e-mail call to action distributed by the American Renewal Project, an organization of conservative pastors.

Ah yes: The American Renewal Project, David Lane’s little effort in practical theocracy designed to get conservative evangelical ministers heavily and unambiguously engaged in partisan politics. Lane has long been closely associated with the American Family Association, the gold standard of homophobia.

Now Cruz’s central role in this lobbying campaign may largely flow from his position in the
Senate, where he has zero inhibitions about defying Mitch McConnell’s vows against government shutdown tactics. But you do have to wonder if Cruz is emerging as the Christian Right favorite, especially in Iowa, a bit ahead of schedule.

After all, Rick Perry missed the first Fox News Debate (as did two other aspirants to Christian Right support, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal) and is having financial issues. Mike Huckabee has his own habitual money troubles, and seems to have lost a step since 2008. And while the quieter and less overtly political breed of conservative evangelical, exemplified by the Southern Baptist Convention spokesman Russell Moore may prefer candidates like Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, or even Jeb Bush, the old-school activists certainly seem to still be in the saddle in the early states. If Cruz can indeed put himself at the front of a crusade to destroy the godless baby-killers of Planned Parenthood, he’ll bask in positive Christian Right publicity right up to the brink of the Iowa Caucuses. Add in the regular presence on the campaign trail of Ted’s deranged father the Rev. Rafael Cruz and the junior senator from Texas has got himself a regular tent revival going.

During my quick trip home to Georgia this weekend, I heard a couple of family discussions of where high school seniors were planning to go the college, and it struck me anew (1) how little real information students and parents often have about their options, and (2) how much misinformation is freely and abundantly available. That’s long been true, no doubt; my high school “guidance counselors” tried to get me to attend an expensive and mediocre college mainly known as a safety school for spoiled yankee kids. More recently, there’s been the fool’s gold of college ratings that basically tell you what they colleges want you to know, and reward big endowments and selectivity as ends in themselves.

We’re proud at WaMo to have broken the mold with rankings that present a fuller and more honest picture of colleges, not just for students and parents but for the taxpayers who foot so much of the aggregate bill. We think the 2015 rankings continue this honorable tradition, and offer most to those who are in need of a lamp unto their feet at a critical point in their lives.

I just landed in SFO after a night in Phoenix, thanks to various weather issues and USAirways. Fortunately, the shuttle we’re having to pay out-of-pocket to get home allegedly has WiFi, so maybe I can at least finish doing a job of work today, after missing the weekly BloggingheadsTV taping (which will feature Paul Glastris with Bloomberg Politics’ Melinda Henneberger).

Here are some jet-lagged midday news/views treats:

* Matt Yglesias tells people not to sell their stocks during a stock market panic. Since it’s called a panic, I doubt anyone will listen.

* Lawrence Summers pleas with Fed not to raise interest rates. Those who fought his appointment as Fed chairman might feel a bit sheepish.

* At the Atlantic, Russell Berman examines HRC’s “change laws, not hearts” message to #BlackLivesMatter.

* At TNR Jeet Heer argues Trump is an “authoritarian bigot,” not a “populist,” though I’d counter-argue the two terms are not mutually exclusive.

* At TPM, Josh Marshall notes that HRC critics again and again assert retroactive judgment that material in emails should have been classified, even if it, you know, wasn’t.

And in non-political news:

* Sign of the season: this year’s best bears-go-for-dip-in-swimming-pool video.

As we break for lunch, here’s another Traffic performance with Capaldi doing lead vocals and Winwood on guitar: “Light Up or Leave Me Alone,” performed in Santa Monica in 1972.

As the college football world comes to grips with a particularly ugly sexual assault scandal involving a member of the Baylor football team, Charlie Pierce meditates, as only he can, on the role of Baylor’s president:

It is something of an irony that the president of Baylor University is Kenneth Starr, the man who was the special prosecutor that pursued President Bill Clinton in an investigation that began with the failed Whitewater land deal in Arkansas and ended with the president being impeached for a consensual sexual affair. In that probe, Starr saw fall guys everywhere, from local politicians in the backwaters of the Ozarks to the West Wing of the White House. One of his first accomplishments after becoming president of Baylor in 2010 was to make sure the school remained within the rapidly re-forming Big 12 conference. So it did, and the football team has prospered mightily. Under Ken Starr, the Bears have gone a fat 47-18. They’ve made a lot of money. They produced Robert Griffin III, a genuine star when he left Baylor.

And now, there is a horrible crime for which one of the Baylor football players has been convicted and sentenced. This has brought back to mind another scandal in which one of the Baylor basketball players was convicted of a crime. Back then, a basketball coach tried to make the dead man a scapegoat in his own death. Now, Baylor’s football coach is trying to hang some of the responsibility for this more recent crime on another coach half a continent away. Starr once deplored this kind of thing in a president. Reacting to the verdict, Starr’s office said in a statement:

“After consulting with the Baylor Board of Regents, the Executive Council and our academic leadership, this afternoon I called for a comprehensive internal inquiry into the circumstances associated with this case and the conduct of the various offices involved. The inquiry will be led by Jeremy Counseller, Professor of Law at Baylor Law School, Baylor’s Faculty Athletics Representative to the Big 12 Conference and NCAA and a former Assistant District Attorney. Mr. Counseller will engage others in his review as he deems appropriate and will submit his report directly to me at the conclusion of his inquiry. After an analysis of his report, I will determine what additional action to take.”

Somebody’s taking the fall. It’s the American way.

And we can expect whoever at Baylor doesn’t take the fall to get extra-pious about it all, even as those who take the fall confess their lapses and ask for instant absolution and a good quick path back to respectability. Good thing for them, Baptists (the religious tradition with which Baylor is heavily identified) don’t even require the intermediary services of a priest.

Whether or not it can be said that Donald Trump is pushing the Republican presidential field “to the right” on immigration policy, there’s zero question he is making it much harder for them to play games with it, as Greg Sargent points out at the Plum Line after watching Scott Walker and Carly Fiorina squirm through questioning on the Sunday shows.

When the GOP candidates are pressed on what they would do about the 11 million, the results tend not to be pretty. For instance, on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd asked Carly Fiorina about Trump’s call for ending birthright citizenship -which Fiorina rejected far more forcefully than Walker did. But then Todd sensibly followed up with this:

TODD: What do you do with the 11 million?

FIORINA: My own view is, if you have come here illegally and stayed here illegally, you do not have an opportunity to earn a pathway to citizenship. To legal status, perhaps. But I think there must be consequence.

Fiorina says that “perhaps” undocumented immigrants should have a path to legal status — provided it precludes any chance at citizenship. Okay, if you’re not willing to support legal status, then what should be done instead? Walker, for his part, has declined to endorse mass deportations, but doesn’t think we should even talk about legalization until the border is secured.

There are really just three legitimate answers to Todd’s question: deportation, self-deportation, or legalization (though it’s possible to have a combination of the three). “I don’t want to talk about it until the border is secured” is a non-answer. Arguments over the remote possibility of repealing “birthright citizenship” are non-responsive, too. And if deportation—which presumably is what “just enforcing the law” would involve—is in the cards, we need frank talk about how to defray the incredibly high costs and whether the police state atmosphere it would involve could have some collateral effects on little matters like who we are as a nation.

Until Trump started talking about deportation, there was a tacit agreement within the GOP to keep it all vague so as to satisfy the people who really would like to see children herded onto cattle cars and sent to the border without alarming everyone else—you know, kind of like the tacit agreement not to discuss Carly Fiorina’s qualifications to be president, which Trump also broke. But journalists really need to stop letting these birds avoid the key questions or have it every which way or change the subject.

I don’t obsessively watch stock market prices, but after last week’s long Wall Street slide, today’s terrifying 1,000-point-at-open plunge of the Dow Jones index served as a reminder that the great God of our economy, the global marketplace, is an adolescent prone to panic attacks. Here’s Krugman’s shrugging judgment before he gets into a deeper analysis of a glut of savings chasing iffy investment opportunities:

Attempts to explain daily stock movements are usually foolish: a real-time survey of the 1987 stock crash found no evidence for any of the rationalizations economists and journalists offered after the fact, finding instead that people were selling because, you guessed it, prices were falling. And the stock market is a terrible guide to the economic future: Paul Samuelson once quipped that the market had predicted nine of the last five recessions, and nothing has changed on that front.

So all we can do at the moment is to hope the idiot psychology of “bargain hunting” turns it all around.

OK, the Biden speculation is really getting insane. All that anyone is able to report as actual news is that some people close to Biden really want him to run for president in 2016, and he hasn’t ruled it out just yet. But the same stories go on to suggest he’s 90% or 95% or 99% sure to run, and then it’s off to the races about his strategy and HOW HE WILL DESTROY HILLARY, which seems to be the real point of the coverage, particularly from conservative outlets.

Check out this lede from the Wall Street Journal’s Carol Lee and Reid Epstein:

Vice President Joe Biden, who has long been considering a presidential bid, is increasingly leaning toward entering the race if it is still possible he can knit together a competitive campaign at this late date, people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Biden still could opt to sit out the 2016 race, and he is weighing multiple political, financial and family considerations before making a final decision. But conversations about the possibility were a prominent feature of an August stay in South Carolina and his home in Delaware last week, these people said. A surprise weekend trip to Washington to meet with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), a darling of the party’s liberal wing, represented a pivot from potential to likely candidate, one Biden supporter said.

National Review’s John Fund, surveying his extensive list of top-tier Democratic sources, has raced ahead to suggest a Biden-Warren ticket based on a Biden one-term pledge, BECAUSE DEMOCRATS ARE PANICKING over Hillary.

Something tells me Biden’s enjoying all this completely cooked up hype and is waiting for the perfect moment to squelch it. Even then, I betcha the speculation continues right up to the moment a restive Democratic Convention longs for Biden-Warren!

Bloomberg’s Will Leitch has published the best account I’ve seen of a Donald Trump event and a Donald Trump crowd, in the context of this weekend’s bizarre pop-up extravaganza in a Mobile football stadium. He grasps that the venue represents the closest thing Alabama offers to an ancient coliseum, or perhaps even a pagan temple (though even a Trump crowd would look puny in the 90,000-plus seat Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa), and the candidate himself is described as having the stage presence associated with a true Alabama god:

Trump doesn’t need a warm-up act, doesn’t even need to warm up. He has always carried himself like someone who is constantly hearing tens of thousands of people chanting his name in his head, so when at an event like this, when it’s actually happening, he’s in his natural element; he took the stage like he was Nick Saban, like he’d lived in Alabama his whole life. “This is beautiful, this is beautiful,” he said, and you never believed anything a politician said more.

Reading about the attendees of this event, you get a clear indication of Trump’s potential staying power as a candidate: something in the medium range. As a protest figure with a few tested crowd-pleasing sound bits and a half-ironic appeal, his constantly predicted “peak” or “decline” or even “implosion” is not happening anytime very soon, barring some sort of political Sin Against the Holy Ghost. And were he to persist as that ultimate kind of protest candidate, an independent general election candidate, you could see him retaining an indestructible core following all the way to November of 2016.

But at some point he’s probably not going to be running first in GOP polls unless he simultaneously refreshes his act while no one in the vast field of rivals begins to cut into his constituency. The $64,000 question is whether his sell-by date precedes the early state contests next January and February.

Today the Washington Monthly releases its annual College Guide and Rankings. This is our answer to U.S News & World Report, which relies on crude and easily manipulated measures of wealth, exclusivity, and prestige for its rankings. Instead, we rate schools based on what they are doing for the country — on whether they’re improving social mobility, producing research, and promoting public service.

The Washington Monthly’s unique methodology yields striking results.

• Only two of U.S. News’ top ten schools, Stanford and Harvard, make the Washington Monthly’s top ten. Yale, Columbia, Brown and Dartmouth don’t even crack our top 40.


• Instead, the University of California - San Diego (our #1 national university for the sixth year in a row) and the University of Texas - El Paso (unranked by U.S. News but #10 on our list) leave the Ivy League in the dust.


• While 19 of the top 20 U.S. News universities are private, 16 of the top 20 Washington Monthly universities are accessible, affordable, high-quality public universities.

This year we also offer an exclusive list of “Best Bang for the Buck” colleges — schools that do the best job helping non-rich students earn marketable degrees at affordable prices. Dominating the list are schools that U.S. News relegates to its lower tiers—places like Berea College and California State-Fullerton. These schools may not be big names nationally, but they deliver for their students big-time.

This year’s College Guide also includes in-depth feature stories that ask tough questions about our increasingly unfair and expensive higher education system, including:

• America’s ten most innovative college presidents


• The ten universities that leave the poor behind


• How chiseling adjuncts shortchanges students


• How states double-cross federal taxpayers on student aid

The complete 2015 college rankings and feature stories can be found here.

Jim Capaldi was born on this day in 1944. Here he is in a rare vocal performance with Traffic, on a song he wrote, “Rock and Roll Stew,” with Steve Winwood on guitar, in 1994.

I’m not quite sure what to make of the rumors that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will pull the plug on his star-crossed presidential campaign by the end of the month. Heck, I almost feel bad for the guy…almost.

You may recall that four years ago, Christie gave a bizarre fourteen-minute speech in which he acknowledged that human-caused climate change was real before announcing that he would pull his state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a Northeastern-based cap-and-trade program, on the specious grounds that the program was ineffective. Several months later, investigative journalist Brad Friedman revealed that Christie made this decision shortly after meeting privately with Charles and David Koch. (Just a coincidence, I’m sure.)

It appears that Christie now knows what it’s like to go out with a wealthy man who says he loves you, only to leave you a few years later for a younger, slimmer model (in this case, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker). Now that Christie has apparently been dumped, what should he do next?

If and when he drops out of the race, Christie might be able to redeem himself by going back to New Jersey and moving to put his state back into RGGI. After all, if he no longer has to genuflect to the greenhouse-gas gentry, why not rejoin a program that has undisputed economic and environmental benefits?

As the New Jersey Star-Ledger noted last year, Christie’s withdraw from RGGI wreaked economic havoc on the Garden State:

It’s official: The governor is so averse to a green economy, he burns money.

Someone has finally slapped a price tag on Gov. Christie’s environmental indifference. According to an analysis from Environment Northeast, his decision to pull out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in 2011 has already cost New Jersey $114 million in revenue from cap-and-trade auctions, and staying out of the carbon reduction venture will cost the state another $387 million over the next six years.

It was providence that created a lowering of emissions - the economy tanked, and many power plants switched from coal to cheaper natural gas, which releases half as much carbon as coal - but this is another inexcusable waste of funds that could be used toward green investments.

And it still does not compute.

This was the governor who once acknowledged that climate change is probably a scientific fact and is probably man-made, but his national ambition drives him to pray at the altar of the Koch Brothers.

He accepts the science, but not the ramifications of the science - at least not when it is politically inconvenient.

Christie made a major mistake when he walked away from RGGI in the name of political convenience. He can undo that mistake before he leaves office. Does he have the guts to do so?

UPDATE: More from Politico.

Donald Trump has done it again. Once again he has captured headlines by taking a blunt, aggressive populist position contrary to GOP orthodoxy—this time against hedge fund managers:

In a telephone interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Trump vowed to reform the tax laws if elected and said the current system was harming middle class Americans who currently faced higher tax rates than traders on Wall Street. “The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky,” Trump said.

“They are energetic. They are very smart. But a lot of them - they are paper-pushers. They make a fortune. They pay no tax. It’s ridiculous, ok?”

…

“Some of them are friends of mine. Some of them, I couldn’t care less about,” Trump said. “It is the wrong thing. These guys are getting away with murder. I want to lower the rates for the middle class.”

It’s worth noting that this is sharper and more derisive language than most Democratic candidates have ever used against the hedge fund crowd. Nor is it the first time that Trump has stood against the big money interests in his own party.

Most of the commentary about Trump’s immigration stance has focused on his hateful near-fascist rhetoric and his incoherent policies. But Trump’s immigration position is important for another reason: it’s a direct challenge to the big money funders of the GOP. The only reason that the GOP has so far avoided a direct spiral into outright xenophobia is that the establishment at the top of the party is conscious that it needs to please the Chamber of Commerce and the billionaires who actually fund their racket. It takes an army of communications professionals expert in dogwhistle politics to align the GOP’s cranky conservative populist base with the interests of its wealthy puppeteers.

That feat is hardest to accomplish on immigration. The Chamber of Commerce wing wants the GOP to adopt a pathway to citizenship for immigrants not just for political reasons (permanently losing the Hispanic vote would be a death knell for the party), but also for financial ones: the employers who make most frequent use of undocumented immigrant labor don’t want their gravy train of underpaid, abused workers to dry up. In conservative circles, the Chamber wing of the party is often called the Cheap Labor wing of the GOP—and many movement conservatives despise it with a passion.

Donald Trump’s candidacy is a direct challenge to the Koch Brothers and the GOP’s other big funders as much as anything else.

Being virulently anti-immigrant and calling for higher taxes on hedge fund managers isn’t a political contradiction. It’s part and parcel of Trump’s intentionally play to wedge the GOP’s voters away from its funders. Unlike Scott Walker or Jeb Bush, Trump doesn’t need the Chamber of Commerce or the hedge fund managers because he doesn’t need their money. He can self-fund his own campaign.

And that in itself is a genuinely interesting development, because Trump could in a single campaign make it difficult if not impossible for the puppet masters to keep the troops in line—not only this cycle, but in future cycles as well.

While many of them may not explicitly realize it, many blue-collar white GOP voters who would never vote for a Democrat for cultural reasons, are making a bet that their support for a single, capricious populist plutocrat may save them from the collusive predation of a group of plutocrats who they know don’t care about them. All things considered, that’s not an irrational bet.

If Trump does win the Republican nomination, Democrats would be wise not to underestimate the appeal of his approach.

I’ve frequently used the devastating failure of Sam Brownback’s conservative economic experiment in Kansas to show that conservative policies aren’t just morally and ethically wrong, but also simply dysfunctional and counterproductive at a basic utilitarian level. Most educated people understand this about supply-side economic policy by now.

It’s also, of course, true of social policy. We know that sexual repression, abstinence education and social stigma is the surest way to increase unintended pregnancy, STD transmission and infidelity. We know that you can’t actually “pray the gay away” even if you wanted to.

And it’s true of immigration policy, that very hot topic at present. Dave Weigel at the Washington Post reminds us of the utter failure of Trump-style immigration policy, in the very state where Trump decided to host his stadium rally:

Alabama, which hosted the largest rally of Trump’s presidential campaign Friday night, had been a test kitchen for Trump-style crackdowns on undocumented workers — and it had not gone well.

In 2011, a new Republican legislature and governor enacted HB 56, the Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act. Chief sponsor Micky Hammon warned the undocumented population that he would “make it difficult for them to live here, so they will deport themselves.” Renting a house or giving a job to an “illegal” became a crime. Police were empowered to demand proof of citizenship from anyone who looked as if he or she might lack it. School administrators were instructed to do the same to children.

The backlash was massive — a legal assault that chipped away at the law, and a political campaign that made Republicans own its consequences. Business groups blamed the tough measures for scaring away capital and for an exodus of workers that hurt the state’s agriculture industry. After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, strategists in his own party blamed his support for the Alabama attrition policy. Those critics included Donald Trump.

It wasn’t just a political failure and black eye for the state. It was also a direct policy failure. As in other states that tried similar experiments, the agriculture sector suffered greatly as workers driven away by hostile policies were not easily replaced.

Asked about the law, Alabama voters rarely say that it worked. Large farms spent millions training new workers. The Byrds conceded that the agriculture sector suffered after some immigrants fled the state. “Most of them left and didn’t come back,” said Terry Darring-Rogers, who works at a Mobile law firm specializing in immigration.

But many Republicans have already forgotten that lesson, allowing their ideology to overwhelm their common sense in the belief that it wasn’t state conservative policy that failed, but the federal government’s interference that stymied it:

To Republicans, the lesson of HB 56 was no longer that it failed. The lesson was that it had not been permitted to work, stymied by the Obama administration. That theory took shape in the displays in some Robertsdale stores, where a sign declaring compliance with ­E-Verify was posted above an even larger ad from the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

Some people will never learn, no matter how much self-inflicted failure they endure. When Josh Duggar and countless similar self-righteous conservatives are exposed as cheating molesters, it doesn’t cause conservatives to question whether their belief system might be causing those problems. They just double down. When abstinence education causes more teen pregnancy than responsible sex education, conservatives double down on the slut shaming. When tax cuts on the rich and wage cuts to government workers lead to economic recession, Republicans don’t question their core economic beliefs; they just claim they weren’t allowed to go far enough.

In a way, modern conservatives are similar to the Communists of old. No matter how obvious the ideology’s failure, the response is always that the policies were not enacted in a strong and pure enough manner.

That inability to come to grips with failure and adjust course, and that insistence on doubling down in the face of adverse results, is part of why many consider modern conservatism to be an almost cultic movement. Its adherents long since stopped caring about the evidence or empirical results. It’s all about who can prove truest to the faith, and maximally annoy and rebel against the evil liberal heathens. Policies and results are really beside the point.