Some of you may have seen my December 2 post showing an “isochronic” map of the world. The map visualized the length of time it took to get from London to anywhere else in the world in 1914. More recently, the good folks at The Telegraph have updated the original 1914 map with 2016 data. To give just one example, it took five days to reach the East Coast of the United States in 1914. Today, it takes half-a-day.
The recent “occupation” of government-owned lands in Eastern Oregon by disgruntled ranchers’ motivated Quoctrung Bui and Margot Sanger-Katz of the New York Times (NYT) to produce an edifying essay on January 6th. It was aptly titled “Why the Government Owns So Much Land in the West.” Curiously, the NYT essay fails to mention one of the most significant, recent, and contentious attempts to “dispose” of federal public lands.
When Ronald Reagan was elected president for his first term in 1980, he received strong support from the so-called Sagebrush Rebels. The Rebels wanted lands owned by the federal government to be transferred to state governments.Their champion was James Watt, a self-proclaimed Sagebrush Rebel who became the Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior.
When I was operating as one of President Reagan’s economic advisers, an early assignment was to analyze the federal government’s landholdings and make recommendations about what to do with them. This was a big job. These lands are vast, covering an area six times that of France.
These public lands represent a huge socialist anomaly in America’s capitalist system. As is the case with all socialist enterprises, they are mismanaged by politicians and bureaucrats dancing to the tunes of narrow interest groups. Indeed, the U.S. nationalized lands represent assets that are worth trillions of dollars, yet they generate negative net cash flows for the government. I first presented my findings and recommendations publically at the annual Public Lands Council meeting of September 1981 in Reno, Nevada. The title of my speech was “Privatize Those Lands”—privatize being a word Mrs. Hanke, a Parisian, had imported from France.
My Reno speech caused a stir. James Watt, the Secretary of the Interior, was furious because he wanted to hand over the lands to the state governments—exchanging one form of socialism for another. Needless to say, I thought I was in deep trouble. Hoping to avoid political immolation, I rapidly sent my analysis to the President.
Reagan instantly responded, taking my side. Better yet, he swiftly made my proposals the Administration’s policy. The president endorsed privatizing federal lands in his budget message for the 1983 fiscal year: “Some of this property is not in use and would be of greater value to society if transferred to the private sector. In the next three years we would save $9 billion by shedding these unnecessary properties while fully protecting and preserving our national parks, forests, wilderness and scenic areas.”
It turned out that Reagan had already thought about this issue. The book Reagan, In His Own Hand (2001) makes that clear. This volume contains 259 essays Reagan wrote in his own hand, mainly scripts for his five minute, five-day-a-week syndicated radio broadcasts in the late 1970s. Reagan, In His Own Hand contains several essays on the subject that clearly foreshadowed his policy statement on privatizing public lands. His 1970s musings on public lands echo the writings of Adam Smith. While Reagan never cited Smith, he employed similar reasoning.
Indeed, Smith concluded in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that “no two characters seem more inconsistent than those of the trader and the sovereign,” as people are more prodigal with the wealth of others than with their own. In that vein, Smith estimated that lands owned by the state were only about 25% as productive as comparable private holdings. Smith believed Europe’s great tracts of crown lands to be “a mere waste and loss of country in respect both of produce and population.”
Unfortunately, political opposition—largely from ill-informed environmentalists and some Sagebrush Rebels, too—stopped Reagan from privatizing. U.S. nationalized lands remain ill-used and a constant source of dispute.
Your odds of “making it to the top” might be better than you think, although it’s tough to stay on top once you get there.
According to research from Cornell University, over 50 percent of Americans find themselves among the top 10 percent of income-earners for at least one year during their working lives. Over 11 percent of Americans will be counted among the top 1 percent of income-earners (i.e., people making at minimum $332,000 per annum) for at least one year.
How is this possible? Simple: the rate of turnover in these groups is extremely high.
Just how high? Some 94 percent of Americans who reach “top 1 percent” income status will enjoy it for only a single year. Approximately 99 percent will lose their “top 1 percent” status within a decade.
Now consider the top 400 U.S. income-earners—a far more exclusive club than the top 1 percent. Between 1992 and 2013, 72 percent of the top 400 retained that title for no more than a year. Over 97 percent retained it for no more than a decade.
HumanProgress.org advisory board member Mark Perry put it well in his recent blog post on this subject:
Whenever we hear commentary about the top or bottom income quintiles, or the top or bottom X% of Americans by income (or the Top 400 taxpayers), a common assumption is that those are static, closed, private clubs with very little dynamic turnover … But economic reality is very different—people move up and down the income quintiles and percentile groups throughout their careers and lives.
What if we look at economic mobility in terms of accumulated wealth, instead of just annual income (the latter tends to fluctuate more)?
The Forbes 400 lists the wealthiest Americans by total estimated net worth, regardless of their income during any given year. Over 71 percent of Forbes 400 listees and their heirs lost their top 400 status between 1982 and 2014.
So, the next time you find yourself discussing the very richest Americans, whether by wealth or income, keep in mind the extraordinarily high rate of turnover among them.
And even if you never become one of the 11.1 percent of Americans who fleetingly find themselves in the “top 1 percent” of U.S. income-earners, you’re still quite possibly part of the global top 1 percent.
With the rise of electronic communications, the volume of snail mail has fallen precipitously, and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has been losing billions of dollars. The 600,000-worker USPS is an unjustified legal monopoly that is heavily subsidized. It is a bureaucratic dinosaur that Congress should put on the way to extinction.
In April, I highlighted an excellent study by Robert J. Shapiro that described USPS subsidies in detail. The subsidies include: exemption from taxes, low-cost government borrowing, monopoly protections, and other special benefits.
Shapiro completed another study in October, which is a great addition to the postal debate. He details how government-conferred advantages have translated into cross-subsidies from USPS monopoly products to products sold in competitive markets. The USPS uses its monopoly over letters and bulk mail to unfairly compete with FedEx, UPS, and others on express mail and packages.
Shapiro finds that USPS raises prices on its monopoly products, and uses those extra revenues to artificially push down prices on its competitive products. For USPS, this makes sense because consumers are less price sensitive for the monopoly products than for the competitive products. Shapiro concludes, “USPS has strong incentives to cross-subsidize its competitive products with revenues from its monopoly operations,” and it does so by $3 billion or more a year.
For Fed Ex, UPS, and other private firms, this is completely unfair because they have to pay taxes, borrow at market rates, and abide by all the normal business laws and regulations. Fed Ex, for example, had an effective income tax rate in 2015 of 35 percent, per the company’s 10‑K. That tax load is money that it could not use for reinvestment to meet the subsidized USPS challenge. Shapiro thinks that “without its subsidies, [the USPS] could probably not compete at all” with its more nimble private competitors.
As Shapiro discusses, Congress and the USPS regulatory agency are familiar with the cross-subsidy problem, but their solutions have been weak. Part of the problem—as we also see with other government businesses like Amtrak—is that USPS is secretive about its accounting, and so the cross-subsidies are hidden.
The solution to all this is privatization and open entry. That would end cross subsidies, increase efficiency, improve transparency, and provide new opportunities for America’s entrepreneurs. Retaining special protections for a centuries-old paper delivery system when 215 billion emails blast around the planet every day is getting pretty silly.
This week, President Obama announced a package of proposals with the ostensible goal of stemming gun crime in America. Unfortunately, however, the proposals represent a mishmash of ideas that lack a solid logical nexus to the problems they’re being offered to solve. President Obama even acknowledged this incongruity himself when he admitted that the tragic shootings he emotionally invoked would not have been prevented by his recommendations.
But faced with a Congress that fundamentally disagrees with the president’s views on gun control, his authority to act is limited, and these proposals are proof. The full “Executive Action” plan released by the White House can be found here, but I thought it would be useful to sum up the major points.
“Engaged in the Business” of Selling Firearms
One of the primary goals of the Obama Administration has been expanding the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). The president and his gun-control allies have long called for universal checks in order to close the (non-existent) “gunshow loophole,” but Congress has thus far refused to go along (and for good reason).
Still, the president gave the impression during his remarks that he would use his executive authority to expand the background check system by reconsidering what it means for people to be “engaged in the business” of selling firearms. For almost 50 years, the ATF regulations have interpreted this somewhat vague phrase by distinguishing those who sell guns commercially as a means of livelihood and those non-commercial sellers who transfer the odd gun every so often. Commercial sellers are required to perform background checks through the NICS system, while non-commercial private sellers are subject to a federal statute requiring that the transferor not know or have reason to know that the recipient of the weapon is prohibited from having it. Every transfer, in other words, is currently regulated by federal law. The only difference is which law applies.
While President Obama’s announcement and the action plan released along with it suggested a move to broaden the category of transferors that are required to put customers through the NICS system, it’s not clear that there has been any change at all.
As Jonathan Adler writes at The Washington Post, there hasn’t been a new ATF rule issued making any substantive change to the government’s interpretation of what it means to be “engaged in the business.” The criteria President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch gave for how they would be assessing whether someone is engaged in the business of selling firearms closely mirror language the ATF included in a recently issued “guidance document.”
The guideline document represents an outline of current federal law, including caselaw based on the longstanding interpretation of the statute, rather than a change. In other words, as Adler writes, this proposal, the centerpiece of President Obama’s plan, may not have any effect on the law at all:
According to the White House, the new ATF guidance is intended “to ensure that anyone who is ‘engaged in the business’ of selling firearms is licensed and conducts background checks on their customers.” The ATF is achieving this not by issuing new regulations (re)defining what it means to be “engaged in the business” of selling guns under federal law. Instead, the ATF issued a guidance document that simply explicates what this legal requirement means, providing examples of the sorts of things that would indicate that a given individual is in the gun business, rather than conducting the occasional personal sale as a hobbyist or as part of an estate liquidation, or something of that sort. According to both the White House release and the ATF guidance, the various indicia identified in the guidance are, in turn, based upon what federal courts have found in relevant cases. (The relevant court decisions are not cited or otherwise identified in the document, and I have asked both ATF and the White House for more information on this point.)
Taken at face value, the new ATF guidance is thus nothing more than a restatement of existing legal requirements. Put another way, it merely identifies those who are already subject to the relevant federal requirements and does not in any way expand the universe of those gun sellers who are required to obtain a license and perform background checks. In other words, it is — as the document says — a guidance, and not a substantive rule. It has no legal effect.
In the event that the administration attempts to enforce the law as if there has been a substantive change, Adler points out that there would be an immediate legal challenge:
A consequence of choosing to issue a guidance document instead of a new regulation, however, is that the guidance document cannot have legal force. That’s what it means to be a guidance — and is one reason that such documents do not have to go through the rulemaking process. To be sure, sometimes agencies do one thing while saying they are doing another — issuing a new substantive regulation that changes the relevant legal requirements but calling it a guidance. Yet when agencies do this, they make themselves legally vulnerable. Courts reviewing agency actions are more concerned with the substance of what an agency does than what the agency calls it. So if one were to conclude that the new ATF guidance is really an expansion of existing regulatory requirements, it would be legally invalid under the Administrative Procedure Act because ATF did not go through the relevant rulemaking requirements.
Our own David Kopel, who recently released a paper on the state of gun control in America, agrees with that understanding of the ATF’s interpretation and also argues that President Obama’s commitment to ensuring that everyone who should have a federal firearms license is able to attain one is actually a reversal of a Clinton-era program of taking licenses away from people who were considered to be selling too few firearms to justify the issuance of a license.
Despite the rhetoric, then, President Obama’s proposals on background checks do not seem designed to upset the status quo in any meaningful way. Whether they’ll be enforced in some new way that raises legal concerns remains to be seen.
Mental Health
More worrisome are the president’s recommendations on mental health and their potential to expand the negative consequences of seeking treatment for mental health problems. Despite acknowledging that mentally ill Americans are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators, and professing a desire not to stigmatize people who seek mental health treatment, the president’s proposals threaten to do exactly that.
Federal law prohibits people who have “been adjudicated as a mental defective,” from possessing firearms. Traditionally, “adjudicated” has been seen as requiring some measure of judicial process, and mental health patients who had not been adjudicated mentally ill by a court could still rely on the patient protection provisions of laws like HIPAA. But over at The National Review, Josh Blackman argues that while President Obama’s proposals will have little, if any, impact at the federal level, they do seem to pave the way for anti-gun state governments to drastically expand the definition of “mentally defective” for purposes of the NICS background system:
Yesterday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would modify HIPAA regulations to allow state health agencies to disclose personally identifiable information of a “mental[ly] defective” individual directly to NICS. On its face, the regulation doesn’t require anyone to disclose this information, and merely allows certain entities that “are responsible for the involuntary commitments or other adjudications” to submit this information to the federal database. But on page 38 of the rule, HHS notes that “this final rule does not preempt State or other laws that may require reporting to the NICS.” In English, that means that while the executive action does not require entities to report this information, progressive states are free (and indeed invited!) to mandate that doctors collect and report this information.
Along with the president’s press conference Tuesday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch sent letters to 50 governors “permitting” them to report the names and information of such individuals from their states to the federal government. The NICS database can be expanded by leaps and bounds, through the actions of cooperative states, without the need for any congressional action. Supporting governors can take a hint. In contrast, Texas governor Greg Abbott tweeted “come and take it.”
Understandably, many in the mental health community are wary of policies that will further stigmatize mental illness or impose conflicts of interest on mental health professionals unsure whether they’re obligated to report their patients to the government.
The president also called on Congress to increase spending for mental health services by $500 million.
Social Security Administration
President Obama also suggested that the NICS system would start incorporating information from the Social Security Administration to prohibit people who are mentally incapable of managing their benefits from purchasing firearms. The action plan released by the White House insists there must be an adequate process for beneficiaries who lose their right to bear arms to contest the decision, but at this early stage it’s unclear what that process will look like.
President Obama’s plans to expand the meaning and scope of the federal prohibition on firearm possession by “mental defectives” is concerning. Few would argue that dangerous people, including violently mentally ill people, should have easy access to firearms, but the problem quickly reduces to how we define what it means to be dangerously mentally ill, who gets to make these determinations, and what recourse exists for individuals who feel they have been unjustly denied their rights.
Unfortunately, President Obama’s proposals do not evince a serious concern about these process issues. The proposals run the risk of further stigmatizing mental health and drastically increasing the liberty cost of seeking treatment. Given the ease with which point-of-sale gun laws are circumvented, the danger in pushing people away from treatment is plainly a grave concern that deserves more attention.
Whether it’s “potential terrorists” from the federal no-fly list or “potentially dangerous” mentally ill citizens reported by their doctors or government bureaucrats, there must be an adequate process in place to protect the rights of people who have not been convicted of any criminal behavior.
National Firearms Act Items
One interesting change in federal firearms law strangely didn’t appear in either the president’s remarks or the action plan released by the White House.
Under the National Firearms Act of 1934, people who wish to acquire, transfer, or manufacture certain weapons and accessories, including machine guns, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and silencers/suppressors, must submit to the ATF fingerprints and passport photos, undergo a background check, and receive a “certification” from a chief law enforcement officer (CLEO) in their jurisdiction.
If the CLEO in an applicant’s jurisdiction refused to authorize the transfer, the ATF would refuse the application. In other words, the ATF gave local law enforcement a veto power over the possession of NFA items. In order to evade the CLEO requirement while still complying with the law, some enthusiasts created what are known as “gun trusts,” which are not subject to the CLEO certification requirement.
Announcing his desire to ensure that everyone involved with NFA-regulated items undergo adequate screening, President Obama announced that he was directing the ATF to enforce the photo, fingerprint, and background check provisions on the trusts as well as the individual applicants. In effect, this would abolish the procedural distinction between an NFA gun trust and an individual applicant.
However, neither President Obama’s remarks nor the action plan mentioned another change from the same new ATF rule promulgation: the abolition of the CLEO certification requirement.
The goal of this final rule is to ensure that the identification and background check requirements apply equally to individuals, trusts, and legal entities. To lessen potential compliance burdens for the public and law enforcement, DOJ has revised the final rule to eliminate the requirement for a certification signed by a chief law enforcement officer (CLEO) and instead require CLEO notification.
So, while it will now be more burdensome for individuals to acquire NFA items through a gun trust, the Obama Administration has also eliminated a bureaucratic burden that incentivized individuals to form the trusts in the first place.
Additional Recommendations
President Obama’s proposal also contains a push for “smart gun” technology that would theoretically ensure guns can only be operated by their owners, a clarification of the reporting obligations for situations in which gun shipments are lost or stolen, and calls for increased “coordination” between federal prosecutors and state and local officials to combat domestic violence.
The prosecution of domestic violence offenses is traditionally a state matter, and it’s unclear what “coordination” with federal prosecutors will entail. The clarification over which party bears responsibility for reporting stolen gun shipments or inventory is unobjectionable. Faith in smart gun technology is largely unjustified at this point, as the technology is underdeveloped and the market seems to have very little interest in it. It’s conceivable that bulk government purchases could “stimulate” that market, but for now smart gun mandates remain largely speculative.
Conclusion
For all the pomp and ceremony, nothing in the president’s proposals is going to put a dent in U.S. gun crime or even substantially change the federal legal landscape. In that sense, apoplectic opponents and overjoyed supporters are both probably overreacting. President Obama’s clarifications on the FFL system and the ATF’s removal of a substantial burden on individual enthusiasts wishing to procure NFA-regulated items may even be improvements over the status quo (in deep contrast to the tone of the president’s emotional message).
The mental health proposals are more worrisome, and the behavior of state governments and federal healthcare agencies in response to an expansion of their power to circumscribe the rights of people seeking mental health treatment will require close scrutiny (and perhaps litigation) to ensure that people diagnosed with mental illnesses are not being unfairly deprived of their rights.
The most disappointing aspect of the proposals is that there is so little in them to suggest that President Obama is willing to address any of the major drivers of gun crime in America. The sad irony is that President Obama could do far more to protect American lives and clean up our streets by ending the drug war than by expanding background checks. Criminals, from gang members to spree shooters, have no trouble passing checks, finding straw purchasers, or simply buying guns on the inherently unregulated black market. As long as there are hundreds of billions of dollars changing hands in the illicit drug market every year, the black market for firearms and the violent competition for market shares will continue to claim thousands of lives annually and make a mockery of the idea of gun control.
Gun crime is a serious problem, and it deserves attention. Unfortunately, these proposals do not offer effective solutions.
In 2015 we witnessed an astonishing sight: by the end of the year news coverage of Donald Trump in major U.S. newspapers eclipsed coverage of every major world hotspot and the dreaded Islamic State.
At the most basic level, this reflects the American tendency to focus on domestic politics during presidential campaigns. Foreign affairs often fade from view as the presidential campaign season heats up and economic and social issues take the fore. But this year foreign policy has in fact been a major focus of the campaign, making this a less powerful effect than in most years.
More importantly, the news flow is a function of Trump’s uncanny ability to set the news agenda. This ability stems only in part from the fact that he holds a commanding lead in the polls. More critical is his tendency to make outrageous statements, tapping into anger and frustration in the electorate, which has not only stimulated outrage and concern on left and right but also discussion about what the Trump phenomenon means beyond the election itself. In December Trump appeared in twice as many stories as both Ted Cruz, his closest competitor in both the polls and coverage, and President Obama. Simply put, Trump is incredibly newsworthy given the way in which American news outlets define news and given the news Americans appear to want.
But less obviously, this pattern also reflects the long-term shrinking of the international news hole in the United States. Since the late 1980s the share of American news devoted to international affairs has shrunk by as much as half in major U.S. newspapers and broadcast television news. With occasional and temporary reversals, this trend has persisted despite increasing globalization, despite constant U.S. military intervention abroad since the early 1990s, and despite 9/11 and the war on terrorism.
Trump’s news dominance has at least three important consequences for U.S foreign policy. First, Trump’s success has clearly shifted the debate on how to confront the Islamic State. Even though Trump’s most outrageous statements about killing the wives and families of terrorists are not serious policy proposals, they have nonetheless found considerable support among the American public. And since Trump continues to lead the field, his competitors have responded by ratcheting up their own rhetoric, leading the Republican contest to take on an increasingly hawkish tone. This has also encouraged Hillary Clinton to continue to take a more aggressive stance toward confronting ISIS than she otherwise would be likely to have done. The end result is that public approval for military intervention against ISIS is at an all-time high.
Second, Trump’s rhetoric has shifted the American debate about borders and refugees in a decidedly nativist direction. Trump’s obsession with the U.S.-Mexican border early on in his campaign and his willingness to suggest extreme measures others would not ensured him a leading role in responding to the Syrian refugee crisis. In the wake of the Paris attacks, Trump’s hyperbole about the dangers posed by immigrants and refugees not only tapped into fears and frustrations of many conservatives but also pushed Republican governors and the other GOP presidential candidates to affirm extreme positions regarding Syrian refugees. At this point it will be surprising if the United States manages to take in even the 10,000 refugees President Obama originally promised and it seems extremely unlikely that the next president will suggest taking in any additional refugees.
But perhaps the most troubling consequence of the Trump phenomenon is its impact on the very quality of the foreign policy debate itself. Thanks to his popularity and the responsive chord his rhetoric has struck, Trump has legitimized a simplistic and naïve approach to dealing with the world. To listen to Trump, the United States can meet all of its challenges simply by “getting tougher” with our adversaries. In a Trump-dominated news environment the world loses its complexity and we lose the ability to ground foreign policy in a realistic and sophisticated debate about how to meet the challenges we face.
Though election watchers remain doubtful that Trump will wind up the Republican nominee, 2016 begins with Trump in first place both in the national polls and in news coverage. And whether Trump wins a single caucus or primary, the echoes of his campaign will be felt for a long time to come.
This week Hillary Clinton became the second prominent Democrat to refuse to answer the question, “What’s the difference between a socialist and a Democrat?”
In July MSNBC host Chris Matthews stumped Democratic national chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D‑FL) with the question. Asked three times, Wasserman Schultz first looked blank, then evaded: “The relevant debate that we’ll be having this campaign is what’s the difference between a Democrat and a Republican.…The difference between a Democrat and Republican is that Democrats fight to make sure everybody has an opportunity to succeed and the Republicans are strangled by their right-wing extremists.”
On Tuesday Matthews asked Clinton the same question. Clinton could see it coming, and she did say of socialism, “I’m not one.” But pressed to explain “What’s the difference between a socialist and a Democrat?” she too retreated to boilerplate:
I can tell you what I am, I am a progressive Democrat … who likes to get things done. And who believes that we’re better off in this country when we’re trying to solve problems together. Getting people to work together. There will always be strong feelings and I respect that, from, you know, the far right, the far left, libertarians, whoever it might be, we need to get people working together.
Hey, thanks for the “libertarians” plug, Madam Secretary! But seriously, why is this a hard question? Here’s a clear answer:
“Socialists believe in government ownership of the means of production, and Democrats don’t.”
Would that be a true statement? If so, why don’t Clinton and Wasserman Schultz just say it?
One possibility, of course, is that they don’t actually think there’s much difference between Democrats and socialists. Clinton, after all, voted with taxpayers only 9 percent of the time as a senator, according to the National Taxpayers Union. She calls herself a “government junkie.” She says, “There is no such thing as other people’s children,” a strikingly collectivist thought. She tried to nationalize health care long before President Obama. Voters could be forgiven for seeing a socialist lurking there. But Clinton has never called for mass nationalization of the Soviet or even the British Labour variety.
Maybe Clinton and Wasserman Schultz see socialism as a beautiful dream that simply can’t be achieved with the current American electorate. Take a look at Clinton’s answer to Matthews: “I am a progressive Democrat … who likes to get things done.” That reminded me of her comment in 2008 when she was running against Barack Obama: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act. It took a president to get it done.” Perhaps in that case and the current one she’s saying that speeches are fine, but she’s the candidate prepared to dig in and do the hard work to “get things done” — the things that King and Obama only talked about, the things that Bernie Sanders gives speeches about, maybe even the things that socialists aspire to do. In 2008 she also explained that she had never supported a single-payer health care system — medical socialism — because “we had to do what would appeal to and actually coincide with what the body politic will and political coalition building was.” That’s a rejection on political grounds, not on the basis of economics, political philosophy, or an understanding of the failures of socialism.
My guess is that politics is driving Wasserman Schultz’s and especially Clinton’s evasion on the question of socialism. This week we’ve seen repeated charges in the mainstream media that Republican presidential candidates were treading cautiously on the issue of the takeover of a federal building in Oregon — or even “flirting with extremists” — because they don’t want to offend voters who are angry at federal land ownership or at federal overreach more generally. Democrats also have base voters, and extreme factions, and voters who might stay home or vote for Ralph Nader if they feel disrespected. Apparently Wasserman Schultz and Clinton think enough Democratic voters to worry about are sympathetic to socialism. They may be right. Although most Americans say they wouldn’t vote for a socialist, a majority of Democrats report favorable views of socialism. Clinton doesn’t want to diss those voters.
And that seems like something that journalists other than Chris Matthews ought to ask about. Let’s see some articles about the refusal of arguably the two most important leaders of the Democratic party (other than President Obama) to state that Democrats are not socialists.