This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 11th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Perhaps it was always a bit too much to ask,

but this election season is less about ideas about debating the purpose of government

and more about finding scapegoats for social problems and childish gestures aimed at showing

strength. Witness the two leading presidential candidates with their embarrassing track records

on issues from freedom of speech to war powers.

Ben Dominic, publisher at the Federalist, joined us to talk about this relatively substance-free election season.

If you've got one, it's May occulta time.

Did you see this coming?

I saw it coming in August.

That's when I wrote the White Identity Politics piece that said he was unlikely

to win but that if he did win it would indicate that the Republican Party you

know no longer was a classically liberal party in any sense.

And I got pushback at the time from a lot of people who were more Trump curious.

And many of them have since written and said, yeah, you were right about that and

Ace of Spades wrote a long thing about it and that kind of thing.

And so I didn't see him, I did not think

that he would win until Rubio didn't get out

before Florida. And then I started to say that he was more likely to win.

Very broadly, this is this conversation we're having as a conversation that's taking place all over Washington, D.C. in the broad big part of the United States

right now, which is, you know, what do we have in terms of political parties which have a long for a long time have just

...