Why Do All the Roads of Crazy Town Lead to MAGA?
Turning the inner-bezel on Horseshoe Theory.
Reminder: No livestream tonight.
But before we start, I want to talk about Joe Lieberman, who passed away yesterday.
Joe Lieberman was the prototype of a man whose party turned its back on him. He was a good Democrat for most of his career, but after 9/11 and Iraq, he fell out of step with the party’s base. It is strange that both of the vice presidential nominees from the 2000 cycle ended their careers estranged from their parties.
Or maybe not so strange. I remember watching the VP debate in 2000, which featured Lieberman and Dick Cheney sitting at a table and having a grown-up conversation about the world, and saying to a friend, “Why can’t these guys be their own ticket?” Lieberman and Cheney would both become bugaboos to progressives and later antagonists to MAGA. In the final accounting, both kept their honor.
Lieberman was more genial than Cheney. I do not believe that anyone who knew Lieberman disliked the guy. He was a model senator: collegial, intellectual, open to compromise, but anchored by deep commitments. He was optimistic. He loved America as it was and thought that it could be made even better.
Joe Lieberman was a patriot. He will be missed.
I never met Lieberman, which is my loss. But I did intersect with him slightly. A few weeks ago he was part of a group which asked the Department of Justice to investigate a number of people—including me—as part of a RICO conspiracy for saying mean things about the group No Labels.
Really, that is a thing that happened. Lieberman sat on a stage and likened me to a member of the KKK.
It’s never fun to be criticized. It’s morally disconcerting to be criticized by someone you admire. So that wasn’t great for me.
I took Lieberman’s criticism to heart and did some soul-searching. Ultimately, I believe that I was right and Lieberman was wrong on this. And I believe that Lieberman’s involvement with No Labels was an error of judgment.
But we all make mistakes and on Lieberman’s balance sheet of service to America, he was still way, way in the black. America was a better place because of him and would be better still if we had ten more Joe Liebermans waiting in the wings.
I hope that this duality will be part of Lieberman’s legacy: The realization that no one bats 1.000. That even excellent public servants err. That we neither expect nor demand our public servants to get everything right. And that true civility of the kind Lieberman exhibited throughout his career is one of the highest goods, because it’s what gets us through the ups and downs.
May Joe Lieberman’s memory be a blessing, both to his family and his country.
1. Crazy for You
On TNL yesterday, Tim, Will, and I talked about Candace Owens leaving the Daily Wire and whether or not her next incarnation will be crazier.
This got me thinking about the intellectual journeys people have been on during the age of Trump.
We’ve seen a number of formerly normal conservatives kind of lose it and set up camp in MAGA. Tucker, Michael Anton, Bill Bennett, Matt Schlapp, Chip Roy, Dennis Prager, Peter Berkowitz. This is a partial list. Obviously.
During the same period we’ve seen a handful of liberals kind of lose it, too. And yet these people also washed up on the shores of MAGA: Naomi Wolf, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and RFK Jr. went semi- or full-MAGA. Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, and other professional contrarians became MAGA-adjacent.
What I haven’t seen is any normal liberals lose it and become radical progressives.
There has not been a normal, prominent liberal Democrat who pulled up stakes and joined the Dirtbag Left, or the commies, or Antifa.1 There hasn’t even been a normal liberal Democrat who turned into Ilhan Omar.
Why is that?
I don’t have an answer. Only a theory.