The term “data journalism” as it is mostly just a marketing scheme. It is just a way to decorate popular fads with the veneer of science. The Left has always wrapped itself in the cloak of science, believing it works like garlic on a vampire. In their case it is intended to ward off Christians and “right-wing extremists.” Vox, 538, Grantland, The Upshot and others have glommed onto all of this and recast generic, boiler plate Progressive dogma as “data journalism.”

Ezra Klein is the worst example. He started out in life as a doctrinaire lefty and has now dressed himself up as a technocratic nerd boy. Ezra Klein went to school for political science and maybe took statistics for liberal arts majors, but otherwise could not count his balls twice and come up with the same number. But, the act sells to the intended audience, largely the same people who watch Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. These are people who want to hear the old time religion.

Anyway, this was posted on MR and you see a couple of gags these guys like to play on their audience. The first is the false dichotomy.

In a July 19 New York Times column, conservative economist Tyler Cowen scolded the egalitarian left for not recognizing that on a global basis inequality has been falling thanks to growth in China and other Asian countries even as it’s risen inside almost all rich countries. In a followup dialogue with Eduardo Porter on whether inequality is really a big problem, Cowen returned to the point that “the biggest inequalities are those across borders” so a laxer attitude toward immigration “should be the number one priority for anyone concerned about income inequality.”

Meanwhile, late Friday night House Republicans passed a bill to strip about 580,000 immigrants of their work permits while President Obama ponders executive action to reduce the pace of deportations and conservative columnist Ross Douthat preemptively slams the illegality of the as-yet-unknown measure.

Which is to say that while Cowen’s point about the global picture is both interesting and correct, his political stance is backwards. It’s not fans of Capital in the 21st Century who are pushing nationalism as an alternative to plutocracy, but its detractors. And though the recent politics in the US Congress have been driven by the somewhat odd sequence of events around the arrival of unaccompanied minors from Central America, the underlying pattern runs much deeper than that.

Yglesias imagines a world of only two options, either have inequality or utopia. We either have xenophobic isolationism or borderless one-worldism. There’s never a third option or gradations between the two poles. The hive minded are obsessed with the boundaries between their team and the other team, which is defined as those not on their team. That leads them to see the world in absolutes, black and white.

In the United Kingdom where the transient political factors are entirely different, the ruling Conservative Party runs on a platform of Capping Welfare and Reducing Immigration. Inside the United States, a major debate has taken place inside GOP circles as to what to do after consecutive Republican Party losses in presidential elections. An initially popular idea, especially in business circles, was that the GOP should moderate its stance on immigration and seek Latino votes. This was, of course, countered by the party’s most retrograde elements — the Michele Bachmanns and the Steve Kings. But more importantly, the pro-immigration impulse was also opposed by the most forward-thinking elements in American conservative politics. Douthat, David Frum, Reihan Salam, and other “reform conservatives” have positioned themselves as leading opponents of a compromise with the White House on immigration.

This bifurcated view of the world leads to another error. That is the belief that all issues are moral. Immigration, for example, should be a public policy issue like zoning bills or utility rates. The people, through their representatives, express their preferred polices and those are made law. As opinions change and new experiences raise new objections, the laws change.

Immigration is not a moral dilemma. It is a debate about how many people from foreign lands we would like to permit into our lands. As citizens everywhere, it is our right to set these limits for whatever reason we like. These choices will turn up in the political math of the parties. For a guy who pitches himself as a statistics maven, he sure seems to struggle understanding the simple political calculus. Foreigners vote for Democrats so Republicans will want fewer foreigners.

The hive minded can never accept that. They lose track of where their identity ends and the issue begins. Rejecting their preferred solution is a personal affront, the equivalent of telling them their kids are ugly. It is why they are so emotional and angry. You can’t be in a mass movement without being outraged.

It is this reformicon ideological tendency, not mainstream liberalism, that has embraced egalitarian nationalism.

And the cause of its rise is not left-wing worries about inequality, but the failure of traditional supply-side economics. Reagan-era conservatives could be for welfare state rollback and broadly pro-immigration because they promised a rising tide that would lift all boats. Now that we’re decades into an era of wage stagnation, those kind of easy promises ring hollow. So for Cameron and the reformicons, a tilt against immigrants is the new answer. On this view, the big problem with trickle-down economics is that the bucket is too leaky. Let the rich get richer, but prevent them from hiring maids from Latin America, and soon enough wages for native-born maids will rise.

The moral math whereby this policy becomes more attractive than the win/win/win alternative of broadly freer movement of people paired with progressive taxation and more provision of public services has always escaped me somewhat. It appears to involve putting a negative value on the interests of foreign-born people. But it is a real movement. But it’s a movement on the right of politics in the United States and other English-speaking countries. Progressives, rightly, see no need to chose between equality and cosmopolitanism.

Finally, this is why Yglesias is an intellect. Tired old ideas about progressive taxation, the metastasizing welfare state and free lunch economics pretty much have no audience outside the hive. That’s been true for three decades now. Instead, the Left clutches at its skirts and bellows about the moral defects of their adversaries. Ezra Klein’s brand of data journalism is nothing more than yelling “those other guys are bad because science” over and over so no one notices he has nothing much to offer.