The Crank Realignment

Top Stories of the Year: #3

I’m sure this fellow is completely normal. (AP Photo/Darryl Webb)

This week, I’ve been counting down the top stories of 2024. At #5 is the search for secular alternatives to Christianity. At #4 is the rise in influence of the YIMBYs. Neither one of those stories is particularly bad, which doesn’t fit the overall tenor of this year, so as you might have guessed, we get to the worse stories now.

Top story #3 is the “crank realignment.”

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Hippies of the Right

I did not, alas, come up with the term “crank realignment.” I’m borrowing it from Matt Yglesias, who coined it in response to the mass defection in August of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s anti-vaccine faction—a cause long associated with the hippie-dippie left—to Donald Trump’s campaign.

Here’s how Yglesias put it:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s transition from semi-prominent Democrat to third party spoiler to Donald Trump endorser is emblematic of a broader, decade-long “crank realignment” in American politics.…

The partisan shifts of both Trump and RFK Jr. are part of a long term cycle in which educated professionals have gravitated toward the Democratic Party coalition and a generic suspicion of institutions and the people who run them has come to be associated with conservative politics. Conservative cranks are not even close to new (the John Birch Society, for example), but they’ve become increasingly prominent, which continues to push educated professionals into Democratic ranks. This generates more partisan alignment on questions like immigration (which in the 1980 and 1990s had basically no relationship partisanship), where views are closely related to psychological attributes that correlate with intelligence and educational attainment.

I think the issue is even broader than this. We’re in a period of about 60 years—the student protest movement on the left broke out in 1964—in which the dominant culture has become increasingly anti-institutional and anti-establishment. For most of that time, we’ve been able to count on the conservatives, for all their other faults, to hold the line and remind us of the importance of institutions. They may have wanted to reform the institutions, but they didn’t want to tear them all down. Until now.

I’m starting to think the real essence of Trumpism is that this is what happens when conservatives become “hippies of the right” and decide that they, too, want to burn down the institutions. (This, in turn, forces Democrats to become the conservative, institutionalist party, which is what they’re struggling to figure out right now. But that’s a new article.)

Yglesias ties the “crank realignment” to an educational realignment (and I have a piece forthcoming on that, too). But it’s important to remember that neither sorting by education nor sorting by sanity are all-or-nothing propositions. Both parties still have their share of the lumpenproletariat, so it’s more a matter of emphasis. It’s something like a 60-40 split that used to go one way and now goes the other way. But because the Republican Party now has a crank at the very, very top, his fellow cranks feel as if they run things. And if RFK and some of his associates get appointed to high-level positions, they will.

Yglesias sees an upside to the Crank Realignment in terms of his policy priorities.

When I was working at The American Prospect and we were trying to nudge the Democratic Party in a more progressive direction, it was a thorn in our side that there were so many people on the left who wanted to talk about how 9/11 was an inside job, GMOs were poisoning our children, and the FDA was ignoring damning evidence about vaccines and autism. We wanted marriage equality and a more generous welfare state, not a fuzzy agglomeration of anti-establishment viewpoints.

But he also worries that the cost is a narrowing of the Democratic coalition. Yet I have been cautioning that Democrats might be so panicked at the prospect of losing uneducated voters that they will seek the worst possible political coalition.

If I’m agitating for a “liberal” realignment of American politics, it’s partly because I live in terror that the realignment will come anyway—but it will be illiberal….

So just in the past few days, Ruy Teixeira sent out a post slavering over a peculiar demographic.

I looked at support/opposition to increasing the Medicare role in prescription drug pricing and support/opposition to the most popular proposal for cracking down on illegal immigration, using the president’s executive powers to directly stop illegal crossing at the southern border. I found that, comparing reported vote in 2020 to expressed vote preference today, the big shift toward Trump occurs precisely among those who both support an aggressive Medicare role in drug pricing and support using presidential powers to stop illegal border crossing.

There’s a lesson there for Democrats should they care to take it.

Let’s talk about what kind of implicit idea would cause someone to combine a traditionally conservative proposal (keeping out immigrants) with a traditionally leftist proposal (government price controls)—and do so in a way that so overwhelms every other consideration, including democracy itself, that it causes them to flip their vote.

The implicit premise is that government exists to hand out favors to “people like me”—and to kick everybody else in the teeth, especially poor immigrants coming here in search of a better life. That particular policy combination indicates a tribal mindset….

At any rate, this is precisely the political realignment I’m trying to avoid, one that brings together the worst of both worlds: bloated Big Government welfare-statism and paranoid, xenophobic nationalism.

There’s still a good chance that this is exactly what we’re going to get.

The crank realignment also explains the collapse of the Libertarian Party, which to be honest has always been a magnet for cranks and has just been waiting to be vacuumed up by the crank-in-chief. I commented on the key moment when the Libertarians held their national convention, where they were supposed to be highlighting their own candidates, and instead gave star billing to RFK and Donald Trump. When those two men joined forces, the Libertarians found it irresistible.

In my experience…, the weakness in the Libertarian movement was not about which ideas they should hold, but whether they needed ideas at all.

This was the main bone of contention between the (even smaller) Objectivist movement—us Ayn Rand people—and the libertarian movement…. Certainly, any large movement is going to have variations and vigorous debates about its philosophical foundations, and it has to be able to accommodate some diversity of views. But many libertarians took this to mean that their movement had no need for any philosophical ideas or foundation.

In practice, this tended to mean that libertarianism became a grab-bag of crackpots holding a variety of contradictory views. And also—well, if you’ve spent much time with libertarians, you know that some of them are just guys who like taking the most outrageously contrarian and socially unacceptable position, for which purpose traditional conservatism was just a bit too stuffy. Now nationalism offers them a better way to troll everyone.

All of this is underscored during the current presidential transition. Our new president, Elon Musk, just killed a spending bill and set us on a course to a government shutdown by rage-tweeting in the middle of the night. In response, Rand Paul—son of Ron Paul and the most prominent libertarian in government—suggested unironically that Republicans make Musk the Speaker of the House. “Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk…(not to mention the joy at seeing the collective establishment, aka 'uniparty,’ lose their ever-lovin’ minds).”

That sums up the contrarianism-for-its-own-sake that killed the Libertarian Party. They don’t care what they do or say, so long as it makes people mad.

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The Tiny Coffins Party

But in absorbing the crackpots from the left and from the Libertarian Party, Republicans have been transforming themselves into the crackpot party. That includes a dangerous turn against vaccines—literally dangerous, in the sense that people are going to die because of it.

Trump’s biggest accomplishment in office was Operation Warp Speed, the program that provided massive financial guarantees and streamlined regulatory barriers to help pharmaceutical companies produce covid vaccines in record time. But it has been a long time since Trump stopped mentioning that at his rallies.

Trump is the populist candidate whose whole base of support is hatred of “the establishment” and “the elites,” which includes some worthy targets but also includes basically anyone with real expertise in a scientific field. This has made him a magnet for cranks and crackpots, and particularly anti-vaxxers.

He has now fully embraced their cause. In a leaked phone call prior to Kennedy’s endorsement, Trump criticized vaccines, and now he is actively campaigning on an anti-vaccine ultimatum. This is not just opposition to the covid vaccine, it’s opposition to all vaccines, and it is specifically opposition to vaccines for children. “On day one, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing Critical Race Theory, and I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.”…

Whatever its causes, this is a rejection of at least 200 years of progress against infectious disease, and it shows the extent to which Republicans have become the Crackpot Party.

It has been so long since infectious diseases stalked the land that we have forgotten the consequences of this. But there’s a detail that jumps out at me in reports about a new measles outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo or about an old one in Samoa for which RFK is partly responsible: rows of tiny coffins. That may end of being the symbol of the anti-vax faction—and of the party that is about to put them in power.

In writing about this, I posed the following conundrum:

The extraordinary paradox of the last four years is that, in response to a global pandemic that killed millions, we developed a vaccine in record time, saving millions of lives and allowing the world to return to normal—yet the response has been a large increase in opposition to vaccines.

That’s something I discuss in an upcoming podcast with Dr. Amesh Adalja, which will be posted soon, and I’ll be writing more about it in the new year.

You will notice that I keep talking about upcoming articles and things I will write about in the new year. There is a lot going on, there will be many battles over the new Congress and the new administration, and I will be here to help you reason through it all.