The New Republic

Is Timothy Noah okay or has he fled in terror upon hearing the bombshell news that Chis Hughes has purchased The New Republic? A few nights back I had a dream that TNR was being ruined under the new regime and I recall very few of my dreams.

- liberalref

March 12, 2012 at 2:50pm

How crazy? In other timely questions- how catholic is the pope? How likely are bears... well, you know the rest.

- miceelf

March 12, 2012 at 2:58pm

When I read Douthat's column yesterday I wondered who was his intended audience. Was it the Republican base, trying to convince them they aren't who they think they are, sort of reverse psychology - base, thanks to you the Republicans haven't yet settled on one crazy candidate but have given all of them a once over and rejected all but three (or four). If so, was Douthat's goal to convince the base that they, the sane ones in this drama, can go ahead and settle on the one candidate that most reflects their sanity, Romney. What's with the right at the NYT and pop psychology? Brooks often uses what should be called backflip psychology.

- rayward

March 12, 2012 at 3:18pm

Well they are crazy. That Romney is leading in the delegate count is because of winner take all rules in many states and his big war chest, not because of any "sanity". As pointed out, he's still not getting as many votes as Gingrich and Santorum (I almost said "Kucinich") combined. If Newt dropped out, and elimintated the split of the really crazy vote, the race would have a whole different dynamic.

- dubyadoubte

March 12, 2012 at 3:26pm

There would be fewer candidates in the Republican presidential race if voters made their choices solely on the basis of electibility. Why vote for a likable candidate who probably won't win?

- Doug12

March 12, 2012 at 3:31pm

I think this is one of the aspects of the modern GOP that gets overlooked most often (comparatively speaking): I'd love to know just how extreme a right wing candidate could actually win the GOP nomination if electability and the ability to raise money didn't play a role in the primary. Just how far to the right is the median GOP primary voter? I suspect to find an equivalent on the left, you'd have to reach deep into Cynthia McKinney territory.

- SEBASTIANSALING@HOTMAIL.COM

March 12, 2012 at 3:47pm

Noah is spot on, but he doesn't go far enough. Three of the four are indeed kooky and they are collectively the majority, but the third supposedly non-kook is surviving only by pretending that he's almost as kooky as they are through serial flip-flopping, lying, and denial. Sorry Ross.

- timteeter

March 12, 2012 at 3:49pm

I don't think that Ross Douthat's columns would be too congenial to the nutters After all, the dreaded left New York Times runs them. Why read him when you can read A. Coulter?

- liberalref

March 12, 2012 at 3:57pm

(Chait) "but to identify [Perry's gaffes] as a badge of the party’s concern for competence is to set the bar below ground level." and (Douthat) "A crazy party might have chosen Cain or Bachmann as its standard-bearer. The Republican electorate dismissed them long before the first ballots were even cast." The South is the base of the Republican party. No fewer than 110 (out of a necessary 270) electoral votes are coming from here. If the evangelical base coming from the South does not abide a nominee, madness can ensue at the Republican National Convention. This is why McCain couldn't choose Lieberman. A more logical rollout of primaries would have placed those states first or had all states vote simultaneously. I'm not so sure Douthat's picture of a sane party would have been upheld if the likes of Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina actually had a chance to vote on Bachmann and Cain. That said, Romney still might have won a plurality, more because there were too many very socially conservative options available, irrationally splitting the vote and letting him prevail with 25% support. Obviously, in this situation, they would engineer a brokered convention to subvert the engineer the will of the fractured majority and probably toss Romney out or saddle him with an authentic conservative coming from outside the Establishment. These were the initial conditions for the Palin pick. But for Romney, we're talking someone more like Huckabee.

- chaitless

March 12, 2012 at 4:26pm

"I'd love to know just how extreme a right wing candidate could actually win the GOP nomination": If allowed to form their ideal government without any other constraints, I think that a fairly large chunk of the GOP would eventually converge on a government in which power is split between the church and the military, each of which is heavily populated by the wealthy aristocracy.

- kluhman

March 12, 2012 at 4:30pm

Those driving their bus may be nuts and the rest are disciplined voters. Very disciplined.

- Bukharin

March 12, 2012 at 4:50pm

The church comprises a major part of the wealthy aristocracy? Really? And the military does, too? Oh, yeah, that Christiantist General Bill Gates is the wealthiest billionaire in our land. The theocratic lieutenants Brin and Page are up there, too, and even more so is Colonel Warren Buffett. In the 2008 election Barack Obama got some 66% of the votes of the wealthy aristocracy, worth $10 million and above. John McCain swept the piddling wealthy, taking about 70% of the votes of those worth between $1 million and $10 million. It is high entertainment reading the comments out here. Some commenters are in need of remedial education, but they probably should get that education first before commenting.

- liberalref

March 12, 2012 at 4:51pm

Has anything like this ever occurred? Why, yes, I think it has. Monty Python had a spoof called "Upper Class Twit of the Year," which reminds of the current Republican contest. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5ba1OKY7Xc

- Nusholtz

March 12, 2012 at 5:31pm

Oops. Didn't realize it was Chotiner, not Noah. Sorry.

- timteeter

March 12, 2012 at 5:32pm

I didn't mean to imply that the church and military are currently populated by the wealthy, but instead, that in the ideal government of many conservatives the power would be shared among the church, military and wealthy since these are the sectors to whom they currently give total deference. As for education, I think I'm in pretty good shape on that score.

- kluhman

March 12, 2012 at 5:57pm

America would be ruled by the wealthy Aristocrats that use their Church to justify their civil authority, establishing America as the Christian nation the founding fathers never wanted, and the military to eliminate anyone who doesn't like it. Of course, it would be populated by the sheeple who consent and are happy, and soon-to-be-detained-indefinitely-on-suspicion-of-being-terrorist malcontents.

- GSpinks

March 12, 2012 at 6:15pm

How is it that you are consistently brilliant, GS? I am envious.

- liberalref

March 12, 2012 at 9:22pm

I keep telling myself, "Be sensible, stop posting silly comments." I keep coming back to the obvious absurdity that we are in the middle of the second civil war and that we need to do a separation of populations akin to what happened when India and Pakistan (and eventually Bangladesh) separated into separate countries, in large part because of religious identity problems and incompatibilities. Are we as crazy as the Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshi? Or are they now living on much more solid ground, mental-political stability-wise than we are?

- skahn

March 12, 2012 at 11:58pm

Douthat is clearly grading on a curve if he thinks the GOP deserves extra credit for not choosing as its standard-bearer "bomb-throwers and ideologues" like Herman Cain, Michele Bachman, Donald Trump or Rick Perry in preference to the "safe option" of Mitt Romney. While the rest of us see a GOP gone mad Douthat sees as a party in a rebuilding year, or as he puts it, "caught between generations" as the Grand OLD Party is dead and the Grand NEW Party has yet to be born. What Douthat refuses to consider in his revisionist re-telling is that the reason more sensible found not to run was the uphill slog and almost certain humiliation they would face of trying to win the nomination of a party that would take Herman Cain, Michele Bachman, Donald Trump - and Sarah Palin - seriously in the first place. What Douthat's column reveals is the unsettling truth that the delusion and critical lack of self-awareness endemic on the right is not just epidemic among the GOP's populist base but reaches all the up into the conservative intelligentsia as well. Movement conservatives simply cannot see a connection between who they are, what they believe, and the consequences this has for their politics, their party and their relationships with the outside world. Republican Party politics today, dominated by the Tea Party and like-minded nativist factions, is identity politics through and through. The GOP doesn't care about the economy, or the environment or foreign policy because politics for them is an extension of self. Conservatives care about themselves and those people like them. Women should not have birth control -- no matter what doctors say and what it means for public health in general -- because "my" religious freedom would be violated. Women shouldn't have access to affordable birth control because "I" shouldn't have to pay for it - even if "I" don't. Just as Douthat fails to make the connection between the quality of the Republican field and the character of the Republican base, right wing conservatives simply will not be held accountable for the logical consequences of their own actions. It's like what one-time neo-conservative Michael Lind once said about the neo-conservative architects of the Second Iraq War who tried to deny the very existence of neo-conservatism as the "enormity" of the debacle in Iraq became too obvious to lie about: "Not since Stalin ordered the US Communist Party to go underground has an American political faction pretended to dissolve itself in public like this."

- TedFrier

March 13, 2012 at 6:23am

Oh please! If several (I lost count) women who'd been sexually assualted by the disgusting Herman Cain had not come forward, he'd be a major front runner right now. The entire party was delighted and charmed by this idiotic sociopath. Douhat is a black-out level ideologe man-boy and the patience TNR writers have for him makes me nuts. Maybe because he speaks in full, inside-the-beltwayish sentences? I don't know. Except for his notable level of priggish mysoginy, he's a very predictable, banal writer and thinker.

- WandreyCer

March 13, 2012 at 8:28am

skahn: You really make a great point, though. It does almost feel like we're in separate countries.

- maxhencke

March 13, 2012 at 9:06am

Now we have moonbats declaring wingnuts crazy. No doubt wingnuts are devastated by this withering criticism - as moonbats are the archetype for cognitive crazy. And Noah-nothing is a recognized authority on crazy and nonsensical blog postings.

- mr_rationale

March 13, 2012 at 9:48am

USA to moonbats: time to move out The latest New York Times/ CBS News poll: Mr. Obama’s approval rating dropped substantially in recent weeks, the poll found, with 41 percent of respondents expressing approval of the job he is doing and 47 percent saying they disapprove — a dangerous position for any incumbent seeking re-election. The last of the trio comes from Rasmussen which illustrates how a full 59% of the country view Obama as "more liberal" than they are themselves.

- mr_rationale

March 13, 2012 at 9:54am

mistake - not noah nothing. though a good imitation

- mr_rationale

March 13, 2012 at 9:54am

I am reading a superb book, Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott, which was recommended by the excellent Tyler Cowen. There are two hilarious anecdotes in this book dealing with the libertarian Austrian economists, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Hayek was invited to be a researcher for an academic in Manhattan but Hayek didn't inform his mentor of his arrival date. When he got to New York, his mentor could not be contacted. Hayek was penniless, so he decided to get a job. As he was about to take a dish-washing job at a restaurant on Sixth Avenue, an hour before he was due to get his hands wet, the academic's office called to say that he had returned. So Hayek was spared having to lower himself to work at an actual job. Wapshott writes, "Indeed, in all his ninety-two years, he never worked for the private sector." What is it that the Heritage staffer calls such people? Oh yeah, "parasites." Also, Wapshott writes that von Mises, according to his wife Margit, did not even know how to boil an egg, he was so impractical. But of course he had other people to do that for him. Another parasite. Of course, rationale, if she hasn't run away for good like usual, will find a way to twist these realities around - it is only bad to be a parasite if you are on the left, of course.

- liberalref

March 13, 2012 at 11:39am

libref, the right has consistently been in favor of most forms of parasitism. I will point out that from a business perspective, what distinguishes Romney's career from that of other more classical parasites is that Romney typically killed his host.

- miceelf

March 13, 2012 at 2:23pm