Writing for the NY Times Magazine, Mark Leibovich riffs on John McCain's recent deprecation of Donald Trump's adoring "crazies," and asks: "Exactly who is crazy and who is not in today’s political environment?" In answering, Leibovich takes the long view of a rather short period (roughly the last 20 years):
While party leaders have criticized Trump for his "tone," he flouts this very criticism as emblematic of a political status quo. Not only is he correct about that, it’s arguable that the political status quo is itself a big bag of calcified crazy. The same "tone" — cautious and hyperdeferential — has dominated politics for a long time and yet our politics haven’t improved. Politicians are so fond of invoking that clichéd definition of insanity [same acts, different expectations] … And yet those same politicians keep coming back year after year, repeating the same old talking points and following the same unspoken rules.
In one way, Leibovich is profoundly correct no matter the time frame, since democracy is an enduring circus in which victory is often born of fringe-mobilization. Today there are in fact more Burkean conservatives out there than tri-corned paranoids, but in presidential elections the GOP can't risk alienating the latter, who could be the necessary margin of electoral success. Hence the GOP has come to ruinously self-define through the enemy within: protesting, poster-toting, "Don't Tread On Me"-chanting bullies. This shoves many authentic conservatives to either non-participating despair or into the welcoming arms of the Democratic Party, which guarantees its margin of victory. For now at least, the party can afford to keep at arm's length — as Hillary has done with some delicacy — any loud, rude, coalition-upsetting, NetRoots-like factions. (Bernie Sanders has more overtly done what Hillary Clinton is subtly doing, and his overtness is killing him.)
Leibovich is, on the other hand, misguided, I think, in asserting that "caution and hyperdeference" have "dominated politics for a long time." Here, Leibovich is arguing that the crazies are nothing new; we've always had the Birchers, the Know-Nothings, the Illuminati-hunters, in general, Hofstadter's whole paranoid crowd. That part of his argument is incontestable. Yet to concurrently argue that caution and hyperdeference, rather than crazy and hyperbullying, have dominated our politics and continue to dominate them in the 21st century is to dismiss an unhinged, barbarous reality.
In catering to the crazies, one of our two major parties is on its way out. It will either be shrouded and sung over or reemerge unrecognizable. Anarchy, nihilism and America-loathing are, happily, self-limiting political programs. And because these have dominated the GOP of late and therefore our politics — really, is there any question about that? — one can only with insurmountable difficulty argue that today's "political status quo" looks and sounds very much like yesterday's — unless one goes way, way back. Which is to say, the GOP's ravings are reminiscent of the Democratic Party's antebellum insanity. Those ravings reflect the unmistakable continuum of a regional, Southern white party, whatever its name.
Demagoguery is also nothing new, although Republicans' party-wide demagoguery is. (And, as noted, in its hyperdeference to the crazy, demagoguery is killing the GOP.) Also dominantly new, in relative chronological terms, are the GOP's denial of science, its far more pronounced anti-intellectualism, its rabid and once-unthinkable assaults on sitting Democratic presidents, and its determination to destroy all progress, notwithstanding the inevitability of it.
That, I'd submit, Mr. Leibovich, is the uncalcified crazy status quo. And its political days are numbered in years — perhaps 10, at the outside.