So any presidential run by Sanders would rely on small contributions and grassroots support. But the core of the strategy would be that challenge to oligarchy, with its focus on values and ideas that have been too long dismissed by prominent presidential contenders and the media that covers them.

In effect, say Sanders, he would only run if he thought that he could fill the great void in the American political discourse, and in so doing inspire voters to reject old orthodoxies in favor of a new populist politics that would have as its core theme economic justice.

When we spoke about what is missing from American politics, Sanders told me that the president America needs would begin the discussion, as Franklin Roosevelt did, by calling out the plutocrats and their political and media minions.

Imagine, explains Sanders, if Americans had a president who said to them: "I am going to stand with you. And I am going to take these guys on. And I understand that they're going to be throwing 30-second ads at me every minute. They're going to do everything they can to undermine my agenda. But I believe that if we stand together, we can defeat them."

The senator explained the concept that would, necessarily, underpin a presidential bid:

"If you had a President who said: 'Nobody in America is going to make less than $12 or $14 an hour,' what do you think that would do? If you had a President who said: 'You know what, everybody in this country is going to get free primary health care within a year,' what do you think that would do? If you had a President say, 'Every kid in this country is going to go to college regardless of their income,' what do you think that would do? If you had a President say, 'I stand here today and guarantee you that we are not going to cut a nickel in Social Security; in fact we're going to improve the Social Security program,' what do you think that would do? If you had a president who said, 'Global warming is the great planetary crisis of our time, I'm going to create millions jobs as we transform our energy system. I know the oil companies don't like it. I know the coal companies don't like it. But that is what this planet needs: we're going to lead the world in that direction. We're going to transform the energy system across this planet-and create millions of jobs while we do that.' If you had a President say that, what kind of excitement would you generate from young people all over this world?"

NEW YORK-I was in federal court here Friday for the sentencing of Jeremy Hammond to 10 years in prison for hacking into the computers of a private security firm that works on behalf of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, and corporations such as Dow Chemical. In 2011 Hammond, now 28, released to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and other publications some 3 million emails from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor.

The sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking and the maximum the judge could impose under a plea agreement in the case. It was wildly disproportionate to the crime-an act of nonviolent civil disobedience that championed the public good by exposing abuses of power by the government and a security firm. But the excessive sentence was the point. The corporate state, rapidly losing credibility and legitimacy, is lashing out like a wounded animal. It is frightened. It feels the heat from a rising flame of revolt. It is especially afraid of those such as Hammond who have the technical skills to break down electronic walls and expose the corrupt workings of power.

"People have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors," Hammond told me when we met in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan about a week and a half before his sentencing.

I did not hope for justice from the court. Judge Loretta A. Preska is a member of the right-wing Federalist Society. And the hack into Stratfor gave the email address and disclosed the password of an account used for business by Preska's husband, Thomas Kavaler, a partner at the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel. Some emails of the firm's corporate clients, including Merrill Lynch, also were exposed. The National Lawyers Guild, because the judge's husband was a victim of the hack, filed a recusal motion that Preska, as chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, was able to deny. Her refusal to recuse herself allowed her to oversee a trial in which she had a huge conflict of interest.

The judge, who herself once was employed at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, fulminated from the bench about Hammond's "total lack of respect for the law." She read a laundry list of his arrests for acts of civil disobedience. She damned what she called his "unrepentant recidivism." She said: "These are not the actions of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela ... or even Daniel Ellsberg; there's nothing high-minded or public-spirited about causing mayhem"-an odd analogy given that Mandela founded the armed wing of the African National Congress, was considered by South Africa's apartheid government and the United States government to be a terrorist and was vilified, along with King and Ellsberg, by the U.S. government. She said there was a "desperate need to promote respect for the law" and a "need for adequate public deterrence." She read from transcripts of Hammond's conversations in Anonymous chat rooms in which he described the goal of hacking into Stratfor as "destroying the target, hoping for bankruptcy, collapse" and called for "maximum mayhem." She admonished him for releasing the unlisted phone number of a retired Arizona police official who allegedly received threatening phone calls afterward.

The judge imposed equally harsh measures that will take effect after Hammond's release from prison. She ordered that he be placed under three years of supervised control, be forbidden to use encryption or aliases online and submit to random searches of his computer equipment, person and home by police and any internal security agency without the necessity of a warrant. The judge said he was legally banned from having any contact with "electronic civil disobedience websites or organizations." By the time she had finished she had shredded all pretense of the rule of law.

The severe sentence-Hammond will serve more time than the combined sentences of four men who were convicted in Britain for hacking related to the U.S. case-was monumentally stupid for a judge seeking to protect the interest of the ruling class. The judicial lynching of Hammond required her to demonstrate a callous disregard for transparency and our right to privacy. It required her to ignore the disturbing information Hammond released showing that the government and Stratfor attempted to link nonviolent dissident groups, including some within Occupy, to terrorist organizations so peaceful dissidents could be prosecuted as terrorists. It required her to accept the frightening fact that intelligence agencies now work on behalf of corporations as well as the state. She also had to sidestep the fact that Hammond made no financial gain from the leak.

The sentencing converges with the state's persecution of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Barrett Brown, along with Glenn Greenwald, Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and Sarah Harrison, four investigative journalists who are now in self-imposed exile from the United States. And as the numbers of our political prisoners and exiled dissidents mount, there is the unmistakable stench of tyranny.

This draconian sentence, like the draconian sentences of other whistle-blowers, will fan revolt. History bears this out. It will solidify the growing understanding that we must resort, if we want to effect real change, to unconventional tactics to thwart the mounting abuses by the corporate state. There is no hope, this sentencing shows, for redress from the judicial system, elected officials or the executive branch. Why should we respect a court system, or a governmental system, that shows no respect to us? Why should we abide by laws that serve only to protect criminals such as Wall Street thieves while leaving the rest of us exposed to abuse? Why should we continue to have faith in structures of power that deny us our most basic rights and civil liberties? Why should we be impoverished so the profits of big banks, corporations and hedge funds can swell?

No one will save us but ourselves. That was the real message sent out by the sentencing of Jeremy Hammond. And just as Hammond was inspired to act by the arrest of Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning, others will be inspired to act by Hammond and the actions taken against him. And we can thank Judge Preska for that.

Hammond is rooted in the Black Bloc. As he was escorted out of the courtroom on the ninth floor of the federal courthouse at 500 Pearl St. on Friday he shouted to roughly 100 people-including a class of prim West Point cadets in their blue uniforms-gathered there: "Long live Anonymous! Hurrah for anarchy!" In a statement he read in court he thanked "Free Anons, the Anonymous Solidarity Network [and] Anarchist Black Cross" for their roles in the fight against oppression.

Hammond has abandoned faith not only in traditional institutions, such as the courts, but nonviolent mass protest and civil disobedience, a point on which he and I diverge. But his analysis of corporate tyranny is correct. And the longer the state ruthlessly persecutes dissidents, the more the state ensures that those who oppose it will resort to radical responses including violence. "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable," John F. Kennedy said. And the corporate state is not only making peaceful change impossible but condemning it as terrorism.

In late October I spent an afternoon with Hammond in New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he had been held for 20 months. He said during our conversation, parts of which his lawyer requested be published only after his sentencing, that he believed that the sole way the people will now have any power is to rise up physically and seize it. My column last week was about that interview, and now I am including previously withheld parts of the conversation.

Hammond defines himself as "an anarchist communist." He seeks to destroy capitalism and the centralized power of the corporate state. His revolutionary vision is "leaderless collectives based on free association, consensus, mutual aid, self-sufficiency and harmony with the environment." He embraces the classic tools of revolt, including mass protests, general strikes and boycotts. And he sees hacking and leaking as part of this resistance, tools not only to reveal the truths about these systems of corporate power but to "disrupt/destroy these systems entirely."

He participated in the Occupy movement in Chicago but found the politics of Occupy too vague and amorphous, a point on which I concur. He said Occupy lacked revolutionary vigor. He told me he did not support what he called the "dogmatic nonviolence doctrine" of many in the Occupy movement, calling it "needlessly limited and divisive." He rejects the idea of acts of civil disobedience that protesters know will lead to their arrest. "The point," he said, "is to carry out acts of resistance and not get caught." He condemns "peace patrols," units formed within the Occupy movement that sought to prohibit acts of vandalism and violence by other protesters-most often members of the Black Bloc-as "a secondary police force." And he spurns the calls by many in Occupy not to antagonize the police, calling the police "the boot boys of the 1 percent, paid to protect the rich and powerful." He said such a tactic of non-confrontation with the police ignored the long history of repression the police have carried out against popular movements, as well as the "profiling and imprisonment of our comrades."

"Because we were unprepared, or perhaps unwilling, to defend our occupations, police and mayors launched coordinated attacks, driving us out of our own parks," he said of the state's closure of the Occupy encampments.

"I fully support and have participated in Black Bloc and other forms of militant direct action," he said. "I do not believe that the ruling powers listen to the people's peaceful protests. Black Bloc is an effective, fluid and dynamic form of protest. It causes disruption outside of predictable/controllable mass demonstrations through 'unarrests,' holding streets, barricades and property destruction. Smashing corporate windows is not violence, especially when compared to the everyday economic violence of sweatshops and 'free trade.' Black Bloc seeks to hit them where it hurts, through economic damage. But more than smashing windows they seek to break the spell of 'law and order' and the artificial limitations we impose on ourselves."

I disagree with Hammond over tactics, but in the end this disagreement is moot. It will be the ruling elites who finally determine our response. If the corporate elites employ the full force of the security and surveillance state against us, if corporate totalitarian rule is one of naked, escalating and brutal physical repression, then the violence of the state will spawn a counter-violence. Judge Preska's decision to judicially lynch Hammond has only added to the fury she and the state are trying to stamp out. An astute ruling class, one aware of the rage rippling across the American landscape, would have released Hammond on Friday and begun to address the crimes he exposed. But our ruling class, while adept at theft, looting, propaganda and repression, is blind to the growing discontent caused by the power imbalance and economic inequality that plague ordinary Americans at a time when half of the country lives in poverty or "near poverty."

"The acts of civil disobedience and direct action that I am being sentenced for today are in line with the principles of community and equality that have guided my life," Hammond told the courtroom. "I hacked into dozens of high-profile corporations and government institutions, understanding very clearly that what I was doing was against the law, and that my actions could land me back in federal prison. But I felt that I had an obligation to use my skills to expose and confront injustice-and to bring the truth to light."

"Could I have achieved the same goals through legal means?" he said. "I have tried everything from voting petitions to peaceful protest and have found that those in power do not want the truth to be exposed. When we speak truth to power we are ignored at best and brutally suppressed at worst. We are confronting a power structure that does not respect its own system of checks and balances, never mind the rights of its own citizens or the international community."

"My first memories of American politics was when Bush stole the election in 2000," he told me at a metal table as we met at the prison in a small room reserved for attorney visits, "and then how Bush used the wave of nationalism after 9/11 to launch unprovoked pre-emptive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. In high school I was involved in publishing 'underground' newsletters criticizing the Patriot Act, the wars, and other Bush-era policies. I attended many anti-war protests in the city [Chicago] and was introduced to other local struggles and the larger anti-corporate globalization movement. I began identifying as an anarchist, started to travel around the country to various mobilizations and conferences, and began getting arrested for various acts."

He said that his experience of street protest, especially against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was seminal, for he saw that the state had little interest in heeding the voices of protesters and others in the public. "Instead, we were labeled as traitors, beaten and arrested."

"I targeted law enforcement systems because of the racism and inequality with which the criminal law is enforced," he admitted in court. "I targeted the manufacturers and distributors of military and police equipment who profit from weaponry used to advance U.S. political and economic interests abroad and to repress people at home. I targeted information security firms because they work in secret to protect government and corporate interests at the expense of individual rights, undermining and discrediting activists, journalists and other truth seekers, and spreading disinformation."

An FBI informant, Hector Xavier Monsegur, posing as an Anonymous member and using the online name "Sabu," prodded Hammond to break into Stratfor and informed him of technical vulnerabilities in websites of the company.

"Why the FBI would introduce us to the hacker who found the initial vulnerability and allow this hack to continue remains a mystery," Hammond said as he faced the judge.

"As a result of the Stratfor hack, some of the dangers of the unregulated private intelligence industry are now known," he said. "It has been revealed through WikiLeaks and other journalists around the world that Stratfor maintained a worldwide network of informants that they used to engage in intrusive and possibly illegal surveillance activities on behalf of large multinational corporations."

At Sabu's urging, Hammond broke into other websites, too. Hammond, at Sabu's request, provided information to hackers enabling them to break into and deface official foreign government websites, including some of Turkey, Iran and Brazil. The names of these three countries are technically under a protective court order but have been reported widely in the press.

"I broke into numerous sites and handed over passwords and backdoors that enabled Sabu-and by extension his FBI handlers-to control these targets," Hammond said.

"I don't know how other information I provided to him may have been used, but I think the government's collection and use of this data needs to be investigated," he went on. "The government celebrates my conviction and imprisonment, hoping that it will close the door on the full story. I took responsibility for my actions, by pleading guilty, but when will the government be made to answer for its crimes?"

Will Sen. Rand Paul, misunderstanding the voices of the undead, block the appointment of Janet Yellen to head the Federal Reserve Board?

No joke. Tea Party fave Paul told The Wall Street Journal he would have preferred Milton Friedman, the free-market fanatic, to the liberal-ish Yellen. But, as a stunned Journal reporter informed the senator, Milton Friedman is, alas, some years dead.

Unbowed, Paul contends he is channeling Friedman from beyond the grave, invoking the Nobel Prize economist to support the senator's quest against Yellen's well-known commitment to easy money policies at the Fed.

Paul has written, "One need not be an economist or mathematician to wonder whether printing money out of thin air is a sound way to help the economy."

You're more than correct, Senator. If you don't know why America is printing more dollar bills, then you definitely are not an economist nor a mathematician.

As a former student of the late professor Friedman, I'm quite certain that Milty would have been thrilled by Yellen's push to mainline more greenbacks into the US economy.

If you return to your seance, Senator, and ask Friedman's ghost about "printing money out of thin air," you'd find out he all but invented the idea. Or, throw away the Ouija Board and read Friedman's A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960, his Nobel-winning work, in which he argued convincingly that the Federal Reserve could have prevented the Great Depression had it radically pumped up the money supply.

Friedman's - and Yellen's - greatest fear is not inflation, but deflation, a disastrous fall in prices because of starving the economy of dollars.

Senator Paul moans that, since the market crash of 2008, the Federal Reserve has printed $3.6 trillion and dumped these dollar bills, ink still wet, into the financial system. Paul is waiting for the day when the printing of all these dollars suddenly will cause the price of a can of tuna to soar to $7,000.

But despite the Fed's smoking-hot printing press, the price of tuna is perilously close to falling. Price inflation today stands at a teeny-weeny 1.2 percent.

It's time for Senator Paul and daddy Congressman Ron Paul and their followers in gold-foil hats to admit that adding trillions to the money supply has not caused hyper-inflation. After a quarter-century of hysterical warnings from the two Pauls, the hyperinflation spaceship never landed and little green dollar men did not eat up the planet.

An Idiot's Guide to Gold-Buggery

The Pauls have told us horror stories of the German hyper-inflation of the early 1920s, when you had to schlep a wheelbarrow full of currency to buy a loaf of bread. The cure Paul pere hawks, is a return to the gold standard, raising zombie economic theories from the grave, where Friedman buried them.

As Friedman warned, there's something far worse than having to pay for a loaf of bread with bags of currency, and that's having to pay for a loaf of bread with a bag of gold.

Notably, the Tea Party, not the guys in the goofy wigs on Fox TV, but the real one in Boston in 1773, was formed principally to protest King George's reimposing the gold standard on the colonies.

The colonies faced a crisis. Bricks of gold don't have babies; and so, when an economy grows rapidly as did early America, there simply is not enough money to represent that new trade and wealth because the currency is limited by a fixed and arbitrary amount of metal.

Here's why. When the money stock stays flat as production and work force grows, each dollar buys more of that production. Sounds good? No way. A monstrous fall in prices and wages means workers and businesses get less for their output and can't pay off old loans. To simplify: When a farmer borrows $100 for land and seed then sells his corn for $50, the farmer goes bust.

The American colonies faced such ruin when gold-backed currency was insufficient to fund our massive expansion. A revolutionary leader of the time explained the insurgent solution, "Happy for us that we fell upon the Project of giving a Credit to Paper."

Happy days ended when the British Parliament counterattacked with the Currency Act of 1764 that, "renders our Paper Money no legal Tender." King George, to shackle the States to the crown's metal-based currency, required purchasing a tax-stamp for each case of tea, which had to be paid for in His Majesty's "pounds sterling."

So the dissidents threw the tea into the ocean.

A century and a half later, after World War I, the British Parliament did it again, reimposing the gold standard. The United States and most of the world joined Britain in the golden noose. Economies strangled and dangled. The Great Depression eased only when FDR, in one of his first acts of office, rescued the United States, setting the dollar free of gold and letting fly the "Federal Reserve Note," created out of thin air - just like America itself.

And while your beloved Friedman did not care for the government caring for people's welfare via New Deal programs, my professor did praise FDR's printing press for expanding the money supply.

In today's hearing, Janet Yellen might remind the Senate of economist J.M. Keynes warning about, "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."

Spend any time around monetary officials and one word you'll hear a lot is "normalization." Most though not all such officials accept that now is no time to be tightfisted, that for the time being credit must be easy and interest rates low. Still, the men in dark suits look forward eagerly to the day when they can go back to their usual job, snatching away the punch bowl whenever the party gets going.

But what if the world we've been living in for the past five years is the new normal? What if depression-like conditions are on track to persist, not for another year or two, but for decades?

You might imagine that speculations along these lines are the province of a radical fringe. And they are indeed radical; but fringe, not so much. A number of economists have been flirting with such thoughts for a while. And now they've moved into the mainstream. In fact, the case for "secular stagnation" - a persistent state in which a depressed economy is the norm, with episodes of full employment few and far between - was made forcefully recently at the most ultrarespectable of venues, the I.M.F.'s big annual research conference. And the person making that case was none other than Larry Summers. Yes, that Larry Summers.

And if Mr. Summers is right, everything respectable people have been saying about economic policy is wrong, and will keep being wrong for a long time.

Mr. Summers began with a point that should be obvious but is often missed: The financial crisis that started the Great Recession is now far behind us. Indeed, by most measures it ended more than four years ago. Yet our economy remains depressed.

He then made a related point: Before the crisis we had a huge housing and debt bubble. Yet even with this huge bubble boosting spending, the overall economy was only so-so - the job market was O.K. but not great, and the boom was never powerful enough to produce significant inflationary pressure.

Mr. Summers went on to draw a remarkable moral: We have, he suggested, an economy whose normal condition is one of inadequate demand - of at least mild depression - and which only gets anywhere close to full employment when it is being buoyed by bubbles.

I'd weigh in with some further evidence. Look at household debt relative to income. That ratio was roughly stable from 1960 to 1985, but rose rapidly and inexorably from 1985 to 2007, when crisis struck. Yet even with households going ever deeper into debt, the economy's performance over the period as a whole was mediocre at best, and demand showed no sign of running ahead of supply. Looking forward, we obviously can't go back to the days of ever-rising debt. Yet that means weaker consumer demand - and without that demand, how are we supposed to return to full employment?

Again, the evidence suggests that we have become an economy whose normal state is one of mild depression, whose brief episodes of prosperity occur only thanks to bubbles and unsustainable borrowing.

Why might this be happening? One answer could be slowing population growth. A growing population creates a demand for new houses, new office buildings, and so on; when growth slows, that demand drops off. America's working-age population rose rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, as baby boomers grew up, and its work force rose even faster, as women moved into the labor market. That's now all behind us. And you can see the effects: Even at the height of the housing bubble, we weren't building nearly as many houses as in the 1970s.

Another important factor may be persistent trade deficits, which emerged in the 1980s and since then have fluctuated but never gone away.

Why does all of this matter? One answer is that central bankers need to stop talking about "exit strategies." Easy money should, and probably will, be with us for a very long time. This, in turn, means we can forget all those scare stories about government debt, which run along the lines of "It may not be a problem now, but just wait until interest rates rise."

More broadly, if our economy has a persistent tendency toward depression, we're going to be living under the looking-glass rules of depression economics - in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly, in which attempts to save more (including attempts to reduce budget deficits) make everyone worse off - for a long time.

I know that many people just hate this kind of talk. It offends their sense of rightness, indeed their sense of morality. Economics is supposed to be about making hard choices (at other people's expense, naturally). It's not supposed to be about persuading people to spend more.

But as Mr. Summers said, the crisis "is not over until it is over" - and economic reality is what it is. And what that reality appears to be right now is one in which depression rules will apply for a very long time.
(c) 2013 Paul Krugman --- The New York Times

If you've watched the high-profile legislative fights of the last few years and found yourself thinking the two parties in the House of Representatives must represent separate countries, you might not be too far off the mark.

In the Senate, the two-lawmakers-per-state structure creates the moderating possibility of legislators from different parties representing the same set of voters. But the House's single-member districts divide it into a body of two separate countries that do not overlap. That separation is exacerbated by rampant gerrymandering and America's increasingly ideologically ghettoized geography. The result is that when it comes to the U.S. House, John Edwards was right to say there are "two Americas" and Barack Obama was wrong to insist that "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America."

In practice, this means that when trying to pass legislation, Speaker John Boehner and his party's leadership only have to market their ideas to the specific nation that lies within Republicans' 234 districts. It means, in other words, that Republicans are empowered to embrace positions that differ from both House Democrats and America as a whole.

The most obvious way to see this was during the government shutdown, when the House Republicans only had to sell their anti-government posture and their budget stonewalling to disproportionately conservative voters within their own distinct country. But the effects of this separation are also felt on other specific issues.

When it comes to the House, John Edwards was right to say there are "two Americas" and Barack Obama was wrong to insist that "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America."

With this in mind, we spent the last few weeks digging through Census data on congressional districts to get a CIA World Factbook-style portrait of the two countries in the House-the one within all the GOP districts (Republistan) and the one within all the Democratic districts (Democravia). The full results are in a table at the bottom of this post.

We did this with a very simple question in mind: How do the differences between the two nations represented in the House correspond to the larger policy differences between the parties?

For starters, take the recent food-stamp cuts championed by House Republicans and opposed by House Democrats. The House GOP represents a country where only about 12 percent of residents receive those benefits, while the House Democrats represent a country where more than 15 percent of residents receive those benefits. That gap does not fully explain the parties' differences over food stamps. But with Republistan less financially reliant on food stamps than Democravia, it may exacerbate those differences.

The periodic battles over federal funding for public-transit systems provide another example. To an America where 5 percent of all residents-or more than 15 million people-rely on public transportation to commute to work every single day, proposals to cut those resources can seem misguided. Such initiatives must seem even more destructive to a House Democratic Caucus that represents a country where almost 9 percent of residents use public transportation to get to their jobs. But in the separate country House Republicans represent, only 1.4 percent of residents use public transportation. That means almost 13 million of those 15 million people who rely on public transportation live in House Democratic districts. Consequently, House Democrats defend such funding while House Republicans push not merely to reduce such funding-but to entirely eliminate it.

The same political dynamic could shape the upcoming debate over tax reform. A full 69 percent of housing in Republistan is owner-occupied, but owners only live in 58 percent of the housing in Democravia. With Republistan having a much larger population, it probably has tens of millions more people than Democravia who potentially benefit from the home-mortgage interest deduction. Not surprisingly, House Republicans have been more skeptical of proposals to limit the deduction, while Democrats have seemed more open to the idea.

Of course, district-by-district Census data show that no demographic difference between the House's two countries is more severe than the racial divide. While it isn't news that GOP districts tend to be whiter than Democratic districts, how much whiter is notable.

Today, whites with no Latino background make up 74 percent of Republistan. That contrasts both with Democratic districts (50 percent non-Latino white) and America as a whole (63 percent non-Latino white). In all, the Republican House represents about 124 million non-Latino white people-51 million more than the country represented by Democratic House members. At the same time, the country House Republicans represent is only 11.7 percent Latino, 8.6 percent African American and 3 percent Asian American, meaning only about 20 million Latinos, 14.5 million African Americans, and 5 million Asian Americans live in their country. By contrast, Democravia is 23 percent Latino, 16.5 percent black, and 7 percent Asian American, meaning it has 33 million Latinos, 24 million African Americans, and 10 million Asian Americans. In all, despite being a country with 23 million fewer total people, Democravia has a whopping 27 million more people of color than Republistan.

These figures tell us a lot about the politics of race. For instance, in terms of political support inside of Republistan, these figures suggest House GOP leaders risk relatively little when they work to gut the Voting Rights Act, tacitly endorse punitive measures against Muslims and immigrants, and bash the federal government for civil-rights enforcement actions that protect people of color. The data from Democravia also suggest that House Democrats have a strong incentive to take positions in support of civil rights.

Immigration is a similar story. Public-opinion surveys show that people of color tend to be among the strongest supporters of immigration reform. Not surprisingly, those reforms are being championed by House Democrats, who represent a country in which almost 48 percent of residents are people of color and almost 26 percent of residents are foreign born. Also unsurprising is that in an America that is almost 35 percent non-white and almost 15 percent foreign born, polls show immigration reform is popular. But the country of 168 million people that House Republicans represent is only 24 percent non-white and 10 percent foreign-born. So Republicans represent a country where blocking immigration reform can be good politics.

The GOP House represents 51 million whites more than Democrats do. Despite having 23 million fewer people, Democravia has 27 million more people of color than Republistan.

None of this to imply that all white people support GOP positions on race issues, nor is it to insinuate that all people of color support Democratic positions on those issues. It is only to suggest that in Republistan the people of color and immigrants who tend to oppose House Republicans' civil rights and immigration policies have comparatively little voting power. Similarly, the numbers suggest that in Democravia, the people of color and immigrants who tend to support Democratic positions on those issues have comparatively more political power.

Despite the cliche that demography is destiny, there are plenty of other factors that sculpt the parties' legislative positions. Money, for instance, plays a big role in deciding elections and, thus, influencing legislators' positions. Who actually turns out to vote in elections-as opposed to who merely lives in a district-also affects the political calculations of members of Congress. And party ideology plays a role.