The idea that the GOP is infected with extremism is starting to diffuse into mainstream discourse. Good.
LA Times, front page, yesterday:
Amid a rebirth of conservative activism that could help Republicans win elections next year, some party insiders now fear that extreme rhetoric and conspiracy theories coming from the angry reaches of the conservative base are undermining the GOP’s broader credibility and casting it as the party of the paranoid.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
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How this affects the next few election cycles could depend on the extent to which the paranoid base chooses candidates. If the Glenn Beck wing of the GOP gets their preferences, Dems should be able to move slightly to the right and pick off independent voters.
Of course, those same insiders have been all too happy to exploit the madness from Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s to present. Now they see a potential liability so they tut-tut in the hopes that having done so, they & their Frankenstein's monster of a party will be seen as something other than a lunatic asylum by November 4th, 2010. After which point, of course, they'll resume unfettered reliance on the same cranks who've brought their party into such disprepute.