I read Jim Geraghty every day mostly for laughs. He is a middle-brow Republican toady and C-List talking head. National Review gives him a space to talk campaign gossip. Predictably, he had a post yesterday denying the obvious in Virginia. That is the presence of a Libertarian straw probably cost The Stupid Party a seat.

The “Libertarians, without a candidate of their own, would otherwise vote for Republicans” theory is not so sound, and it’s not a factor Republicans should base a strategy on.

Those willing to vote Libertarian — as opposed to those who describe themselves as libertarian or having some libertarian views — are usually deeply attached to policy positions that are still pretty unpopular to Republicans as a whole — oftentimes (though not always) a quasi-isolationist or outright isolationist foreign policy, drug legalization (often well beyond marijuana), and gay marriage. Many (but not all) Libertarians oppose restrictions on abortion, habitually offer long diatribes about the Federal Reserve and the Gold Standard, and in some quarters, an inability to discuss U.S. foreign policy regarding Israel without lapsing into conspiracy theories and uglier sentiments.

Ah yes. Those people voting for third parties are “ugly” and we don’t want anything to do with them anyway. While it is true that most Libertarians are bat-shit crazy, most who vote for these guys just find the main party options too odious to support. The GOP had a chance to win in Virginia, but demanded that the candidate be a long time bagman with a long history of helping Democrats win policy debates. Asking conservative-leaning voters to support that flaming bag of poop is asking a lot.

What’s more, a lot of self-identified Libertarians see their policy differences with Republicans as key to their political identity; otherwise, they would be Republicans. To many Libertarians, the difference with Republicans is the point.

Nor is there much evidence that Libertarians fear that their vote will elect a Democrat. For all of of the alleged or potential flaws of voters who choose Libertarian-party candidates, they’re usually not stupid. They know their guy is in the single digits in the polls. They’re not voting in order to vote for a winner, and hearing Republicans complain that the Libertarian cost them the victory doesn’t make them feel guilty or a sense of regret. They may feel a bit of vindication in that result.

Why would anyone think Gillespie is different from Warner? Hod carriers like Geraghty imagine a world where placement of the 75th comma on page 1,822 of the 3,500 omnibus spending measure that grows the state by 10% a year in perpetuity is a battle worth waging. To people who would like to see one year in their lifetime where government actually shrinks in real dollars tend to think those fights are just a giant circle-jerk for the benefit of the hack-a-rama.

I take a back seat to no man in my condemnation of Libertarians. I think they are as nutty as Progressives. But, they vote their interests and that’s not something most conservatives can say these days. If you vote and you’re not a Liberal, you are either voting for a guy who honestly wants to murder you or the guy who wants to help him, but would like to be on good terms with you until the right moment.

When I was a young man, I used to hear old people say something along the lines that young people would listen to each other, but never to those older than them. The sign a young man was maturing was when he sought out the advice of older people. This always seemed strange to me. I knew young people were idiots, including myself. Taking advice from any of them seemed like idiocy to me. I was young and dumb, but not that dumb. If I needed help, I went and found an old guy.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that I was way dumber than I realized in my youth. While I was right to seek out information from older people, I was not very good at figuring out which old people were worth consulting. That comes with age and experience. As you get older, you acquire your own knowledge, but you also get better at figuring out who is worth listening to or reading. Number one on the list of people you ignore is young people. God bless ‘em, but they don’t know anything and they don’t know anyone who knows anything.

That all came to mind while reading this post by Charles Alphabet Cooke on National Review. He is out with a book called the Conservatarian Manifesto. From the post:

The book is in part a look at the growing number of self-identified “conservatarians” — those people whose worldview is broadly right-leaning, but who are dissatisfied with the Republican party and with much of libertarianism. I also make some suggestions as to how conservatives can update their offering, propose a framework within which their various constituents can once again co-exist, and take on the notion that there is such a thing as a “social issue” per se. At the book’s heart is a sustained defense of federalism and of a thriving and diverse civil society.

My first thought, was that Mr. Cooke is a little young to be offering up a new political philosophy. Last week he was riding his Big Wheel around the driveway. His writing has the feel of the college sophomore coming home for Winter Solstice, lecturing the family about the real world. Even when you agree with him you cringe a little.

Putting my mean spirited bigotry towards the young to the side, I was reminded of when Rod Dreher went bonkers a decade ago and tried to build a cult around breakfast cereal. His shtick was “granola conservatism” otherwise known as “crunchy cons.” He defined these individuals as traditionalist conservatives who believed in environmental conservation, frugal living, and the preservation of traditional family values. They also express skepticism about aspects of free market capitalism and they are usually religious (typically traditionalist Roman Catholics or conservative Protestants).

Of course, those of us who remembered when guys like Joe Sobran and Sam Francis were writing for respectable publications knew that conservatives were never capitalists nor prone to worship at the altar of free markets. Dreher’s “new” flavor of conservatism was just the original product with some of his own eccentric foibles sprinkled on top. It’s why no one remembers “granola conservatism” or Rod Dreher. It was the rantings of a young man in the sophomore stage of his life.

Cooke’s new brand of conservatism sounds just like libertarianism circa 1984. Thirty years ago libertarians were the guys who did not want to fight the Left over issues like abortion and they thought guys like Jerry Falwell were icky and gross. Libertarians famously broke with Reagan over, wait for it, the war on drugs. I know, it sounds crazy, but that was one of the main reasons Ron Paul gave for bolting the Republican Party in the Reagan years.

Cooke’s proposed new cult is basically 1980’s libertarianism with less of an emphasis on free weed. The obvious irrationality is the same we see with libertarianism. If people are to be free to organize themselves as they see fit, that means people will want their government to do a lot of things libertarians find unpleasant. The only sort of human that could live in a libertarian paradise is a person who detests his fellow humans so much he refuses to have anything to do with them. Otherwise, social creatures put rules on one another in order to facilitate mutually beneficial relations. That scales up to what we know as culture.

But, culture is tough intellectual ground to cover and most libertarians are simply not bright enough to master the material. Young people like Mr. Cooke have been marinated in Cultural Marxism since birth and that means they have a Pavlovian response to anything that bumps into culture. That response is to run and hide under the bed or, if they are a true believer, scream at the heretic until he runs and hides under the bed.

The only debates worth having in a civil society are cultural debates. What kind of people we choose to be is the only thing we can leave to the next generation. It is what they will stand upon as they decide how they will order themselves and how they will choose to be remembered. The reason these debates get so ugly and nasty is because they are so important. No one gives a crap about tax policy enough to lose a friend over it. People care about the culture and they are willing to fight over it, unless they are a conservatarian, I guess.

The trouble with the trip to Utopia is when you get there, not everyone agrees it is, in fact, the paradise everyone imagined. Since perfect social harmony is the hallmark of Utopia, those still grousing about the lack of perfection begin to look suspiciously at those saying they have reached Eden. Similarly, the people ready to settle into the garden look at the complainers as the final burr under the saddle of humanity. Both sides conclude that the only way forward is to get rid of the other side. Regardless of outcome, this cycle continues with all utopian groups until there’s no one left. Utopia, it turns out, is standing alone on the hilltop drenched in the blood of your former comrades.

The Cult of Modern Liberalism is suffering from the same trouble. What has kept the whole thing together is a hatred of the Trads, tradition Americans. They began with blacks and plutocrats. Then they started adding all sorts of weirdos and misfits into the coalition. The trouble with that is blacks are not all that fond of Jews and Homos. The Homos are not fond of one another. The feminists hate the Asians and the Homos. The weird thing about the Liberal coalition is they have only one thing in common, spiritually, emotionally and practically. That’s a distrust of Trads, particularly the pale penis people of the middle-class.

Obama reaching the White House was supposed to be the promised land. The trouble is few of his followers agreed it was the promised land. Six years later they are starting to take aim at one another.

Rose McGowan has declared an “indictment” of the gay community, claiming that homosexual men are “more misogynistic” than their straight counterparts and dismissing those who boycotted the Brunei-owned Dorchester Hotel collection as “delusional idiots”.

The American actress, who claims to have lived a life “heavily entrenched” in LGBT, was discussing the protest against the hotel chain with gay author Brett Easton Ellis in his weekly podcast when she made the comments.

The Dorchester Collection, which is owned by the Sultan of Brunei, has been the subject of boycotts since the controversial change to the penal code was scheduled to come into effect on 22 April 2014 that made homosexuality punishable by stoning to death.

Stephen Fry was among the first celebrities to attach themselves to the campaign.

The American Psycho author opened the conversation by calling the Dorchester Collection boycott a “form of narcissistic, self-victimisation, gay insanity” based on “illusionary and tenuous” reports about the Sharia law that ultimately led to the harming of “the people who simply work at the hotel”.

The actress, who herself held a defiant anti-boycott party at the Beverly Hills Hotel over the summer, agreed, then condemned the campaigners for failing to fight against the human rights abuses on behalf of women in Arab states, too.

“Gay men are as misogynistic as straight men, if not more so,” she said. “I have an indictment of the gay community right now, I’m actually really upset with them.”

What we are seeing now is the various groups packed into the positive rights pyramid looking around wondering if this is all there is and concluding that the real problem is the other misfits in the coalition. Ms. McGowan has decided she would rather spend her time with the pale penis people than her fellow benighted. Blacks and Asians seem to be coming to the same conclusion. Lunatic on lunatic violence is sure to follow.

It appears that no amount of facts or experience will kill some fantasies. The myth of the Latino voter is one example.

With President Barack Obama vowing to press ahead on immigration, prominent Hispanic Republicans are worried about the reaction of staunch conservatives. They fear it will harm the party’s ability to win over Latinos in the next presidential election and beyond.

This chart makes clear that Hispanics are not that important and no amount of pandering will change the party split.

But, when objective reality is infinity negotiable. why bother with facts?

While immigration was generally a muted issue in elections dominated by the Republicans, Obama promised the next day to move ahead on his own to remove the threat of deportation or grant work permits to an unspecified number of immigrants living here illegally.

“The initial reaction from Republicans is going to be very ugly and not well- thought-out, unfortunately,” said Alfonso Aguilar, former chief of the U.S. Office of Citizenship in the George W. Bush administration and executive director of Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles.

Immigration was a central feature of many races, but pretending otherwise is so much more fun.

Aguilar said congressional Republicans must offer a plausible alternative to the president’s plan, especially since the Republican- controlled House has shelved bipartisan immigration legislation. His call echoes those of some of the party’s potential 2016 candidates to reach out to Hispanic voters in some way.

This is what I call the Lunatic’s Gambit. It works like this. The Left decides some issue has to be addressed. It is so urgent that “doing nothing is no longer an option.” Then they offer up their crackpot plan to address the crisis. When normal people object to the crackpot plan, the Left begins demanding the other side propose an alternative they will accept, or else we just have to go along with their crackpot idea. In this case, merely stopping a Caesarian power grab by the executive is not enough. The GOP has to come up with some way to satisfy the fanatics or else they must stand aside and allow Obama to declare himself emperor.

But House Republican aides note that Speaker John Boehner and others have no effective way to tone down comments of members who stridently oppose looser immigration rules. Indeed, many of those members are proud to defy party leaders.

Boehner himself likened Obama’s remarks to playing with matches. “He’s going to burn himself if he continues to go down this path,” Boehner said Thursday, a day after Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell warned the president not to act without congressional approval. Such a move, McConnell said, “poisons the well” for potential bipartisan efforts.

A Congress controlled by the Republicans come January “will defend itself and our citizens from these lawless actions,” said Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions.

Aguilar and others are concerned that conservative firebrands will go further in their rhetoric, perhaps by calling for Obama’s impeachment or for mass deportations — creating a political sweet spot for Democrats not long after the Republican triumph at the polls and exposing a rift inside the party just as it assumes control of both chambers.

Well, I’m concerned that my neighborhood will be flooded with disease riddled peasants form the third world. That’s a concern Alfonso Aguilar does not have as he lives in a bunker community that is whiter than Reykjavik. If Alfonso Aguilar gets his feelings hurt because patriots say mean things about the open borders fanatics I can live with that. I can’t live in Tijuana Norte.

The first takeaway for me is the toughness of Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. For the Cult, having an extreme right-wing extremist in the governor’s mansion is a click worse for them than a Jewish lesbian as mayor of Mecca would be for Muslims. Wisconsin is the spiritual home of the Cult. For instance, as soon as Obama became the leader of the Cult, his first act was to go to Madison and give a speech to the faithful. Walker’s success is a sin against nature in the minds of the faithful. That’s why they threw everything in the bucket at the guy.

The lesson to be drawn from Walker’s success is two-fold. One is that no state is majority Liberal. Liberal states have a lot of fanatics, but they are not a majority. They are just better organized and perhaps more fanatical. The majority in any state will be sensible people. Walker’s appeal is based on responsible and prudent government. That’s why he has succeeded in a place thought terminally hostile to common sense.

The second part of this is that Walker never just made the green-eyeshade argument. He connected his policies with people’s sense of decency and fairness. Public sector unions are expensive and unnecessary. People can live with that if the product is good. Walker made the connection between bad product and the unions. You can sell better and you can sell cheaper. Better and cheaper sells itself. That’s why a mundane guy like Walker can withstand the best the Cult can throw at a man and still win.

Another takeaway is at the other end of the scale. Scott Brown managed to lose to a wretched old bag in a state generally amenable to moderate Republicans. He suffered from one unfixable problem and that is the fact he just moved to the state last week. New Hampshire is a funny state. A lot of voters there would have a tough time voting for a Masshole, regardless of his opponent. Granite Staters are an ornery bunch. There was simply no way Brown could explain away the fact he moved to New Hampshire just to run for Senate.

His bigger problem was self-inflicted. Brown had nothing to sell. Conservative Inc is always prattling on about electability, but one part of electability is having a reason to run. The Karl Rove approach of never uttering a discouraging word or taking a difficult stand, results in bowls full of mush like Brown. Brown should have picked a couple if issues and pounded those relentlessly. The voters who saw him as a carpetbagger would at least have had second thoughts about voting against the Masshole. Instead Brown played it safe and is now looking for work.

The other thing I find interesting is what went on in Maryland. In fifty years the state has had a Republican in the governor’s mansion for six years. The Democrat running this time is the Lt. Governor and backed by the full party and had Obama in to stump for him. He’s also black, running in a state that is the fourth blackest in the nation. His opponent was a guy no one knew until yesterday. Larry Hogan is still an unknown to most voters. His victory is due entirely to the fact he is not black and he is not a Liberal Democrat.

The other unique thing about Maryland is it has a large black middle-class that is suburban. The collapse of Baltimore and Washington first led to white flight and then to black flight. Those black people living in the burbs enjoying middle-class life are finding it hard to keep it real when it means tax hikes and a tough economy. All around the country black turnout was down. More frightening if you are a Liberal Democrat is 10% of those who did vote voted Republican. In Maryland, the share was most certainly higher.

Finally, and this is for the optimists, this may signal the end of the Left as we know it. In the 60’s and 70’s, Liberalism ate itself. In 1980 Reagan ran against Liberalism. He turned it into an epithet. The Cult did not fold up; they simply hid out in the Democratic Party, which still had loads of normals and even a fair chunk of conservatives. Mass media was dominated by Liberals willing to run interference for their coreligionists in office. Liberal pols could talk one way at home, but be pure moonbat in DC and no one was the wiser.

That’s not what we see today. For the first time in our history we have a purely ideological party. If you run as a Democrat, you are a Liberal. There’s no party to give the Cult cover because the party is the Cult and the Cult is the party. If the people are turning on Liberals, it will bring down the Democratic Party, unless they shed the Cult, which is unlikely. Maps like this one and the fact that the Democrats control very few state houses now, suggest the Democrats are about to become a fringe party, based in a few coastal cities.

Back in the 70’s, the argument for supporting Nixon was that he could win. He was a train wreck morally and his domestic policy ideas were no different from the Liberals. Unlike the doves on the Left, he was a hard headed realist when it came to foreign policy, particularly with the Soviets. In the 40’s and 50’s, Nixon was a staunch red hunter so no one could question his commitment to fighting the commies. The fact that Goldwater was crushed in ’64 gave the conciliatory wing of the Republican Party to argue that Nixon was the best shot at winning anything nationally.

Amazingly, the same arguments were used to defend Ford against the Reagan challenge in 1976. Mild, stable Jerry Ford was what the country needed, not the rash Goldwater conservative. Much like we have seen recently, the party elders stepped in to put their guys on the ticket instead of the Reagan revolutionaries lurking in the grassroots. Ford lost to Carter and the nation dipped further into the dark funk known as the 70’s.

The point of this miserable walk down memory lane is that the old line about electability is not new. The party brass protecting their guys from the voters is nothing new either. This has been a dilemma facing sensible voters since the Great Depression. The guys they want to support are thwarted by the party and they are left with two options that they don’t like. The argument is you have to support the least odious choice or the most odious choice will win and you don’t want that, do you? Sounds familiar right now, I’m sure.

The old Buckley line was that you should vote for the most rightward leaning candidate that can win in the primary and then vote for the most rightward leaning candidate in the general. That sounds good and you hear a lot of sensible people saying it in this election cycle. “Candidate X may be an open borders fanatic but they are better than the Liberal Democrat! If you are holding out for the perfectly pure candidate, the bad guys will win!” I’ve had this said to me a few times of late when I point out that most of the Republican offerings are just slightly less liberal than their opponent.

This has been the pattern for my entire life. The Liberal Democrats march further into lunacy while the Republicans trudge along behind them, like the retarded little brother tagging along behind his older brother. Ted Cruz, for example, is now considered a way out on the fringe conservative. Liberal tourettes includes the uncontrolled shouting of “Ted Cruz” along with “Koch Brothers” and “Tea Party.” Yet, in the 1980’s, Ted Cruz would have been a moderate Democrat. That’s how far things have gone in three decades.

If you look at Federal spending in 1968 (circling back to Nixon), adjust for inflation and population to arrive at a spending per capita number in today’s dollars, the leviathan was between a quarter and a third the size it is today.

In the Nixon era, the EPA was created along with OSHA. Outside of the IRS, no federal department has done more damage to the freedom of Americans than the EPA. OSHA is a close second. Of course, the money printing robbed millions of their savings. Watergate looks mild by comparison, but it was the cherry on top of the compromise sundae foisted on us.

The point of all this is that the preferred strategy of the Republican Party and Conservative Inc. has resulted in a steady destruction of self government in favor a corporatist, custodial state. The success of these guys tonight promises to keep that line on the graph heading north until it runs off the page. Our elections have become a perverse game where heads you lose-tails they win.

As I write this the chattering loons on MSNBC are fighting over who gets to hang themselves from the light boom. I’m not going to lie and say I’m not enjoying the site of the heavily sedated lesbian trying to keep it together. Still, I’m not inclined to think this election will make any difference. The long slow walk to the cliff will go on unabated. I will probably live long enough to see Republicans glowingly quoting Obama as a model for their brand of sensible conservatism.

My read on Debbie Wasserman Schultz is that she serves one purpose. She’s good at wiggling her ass in front of old Jewish men who write checks for the Florida Democrats. She may not be your cup of tea, but old guys at the Breakers just love gals like Debbie. She reminds them of the girls they married or should have married. Now, they have a weathered old bat nagging them all day. Debbie parlayed that into a nice local career, but ambition got the better of her and she tried to become a national figure. The results have not been good.

Still, she is a true believer with the IQ of a gold fish and the tenacity of a pit bull. Politics is not an intellectual game. It is about willpower and Debbie has that is spades. She wants to win more than anything and is willing to say and do anything to win. In another age, she would have been the king’s top concubine or maybe the local madam. She may be dumb as a post, but that shear determination to win overcomes a lot.

That’s the real power of the Cult. They put lunatics to good use. Here’s Debbie Wasserman Schultz doing her Baghdad Bob routine.

Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) predicted Sunday that her party will hold the Senate in Tuesday’s midterms thanks to its “superior” ground games in key states.

“I think we’re going to hold the Senate,” Wasserman Schultz said during an interview with ABC’s “This Week.” “We have a ground game that I know [the GOP] would take over theirs any day of the week.”

Wassermann Schultz also cited the high-level surrogates working with Democratic candidates on the campaign trail, including former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden.

Noting close poll numbers in key states, she said the Democratic party’s advantages are “superior to the ones that Republicans have.”

“When we keep races this close, Democrats win,” said Wasserman Schultz.

The upbeat assessment stood in stark contrast to the conclusions drawn by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus during the same segment.

“Our ground game is whipping their ground game,” Priebus said, adding later, “We’re going to have a great night.”

“I would be very disappointed” if Republicans don’t take the Senate, he continued. “[But] the DNC in reality is not our competition … Their message isn’t working. If they have such a great message, they would be winning across the board.”

Republicans need to gain six seats in Tuesday’s election to take control of the Senate, though there is a chance the chamber’s leadership might not be decided until potential run-offs in December or January.

Anything can happen, of course, but the best data says the GOP wins the Senate and it will not be very close. What I find striking is the whole “ground game” business. The Cult is convinced they are on the right side of history. Events will carry them to the promised land and wash away the heretics. That’s really what they mean by ground game and GOTV efforts. They deeply believe there’s an army of the faithful manning phone banks, rounding up derelicts and aliens to vote and convincing the citizenry to get on the winning side.

It’s why they are convinced in things like voter suppression and “murky sources” mysteriously altering the outcome of elections. After all, if you’re on the right side of history, leading the masses to the promised land, how can you lose an election? The only reasons, the only plausible explanations, are nefarious forces thwarting your efforts. That’s why the Cult is so emotionally invested in get out the vote drives. It reinforces the narrative, but also provides some out for when things go poorly.

I’ve always admired the Left’s ability to quickly rationalize disconfirmation. Unlike any other religious movement, it has the ability to absorb defeats and turn them into building blocks for future assaults on their enemies. The Romans, before empire, had a similar quality. No matter how badly there were beaten in battle, they just assumed they would win eventually. It’s probably what stymied Hannibal. Even after Cannae, the Romans were not defeated. The American Left is similar. No amount of evidence will break the spirit of the believers.

Facing a bad night this Tuesday, Joe Biden is already saying the results will force the other side to yield.

Vice President Joe Biden says he expects congressional Republicans to work to “get things done” if they win control of the Senate — and he notes the White House is prepared to give a little.

In an interview with CNN released on Monday, Biden said that while he still expects the Democrats to retain Senate control, he believes a Republican-controlled Senate will move beyond obstructionism.

“[G]oing into 2016, the Republicans have to make a decision whether they’re in control or not in control,” the vice president told Gloria Borger. “Are they going to begin to allow things to happen? Or are they going to continue to be obstructionists? And I think they’re going to choose to get things done.”

It really is amazing to watch. The people could rise up, drag Obama from the White House and hang him from a lamp post and the Left would respond by saying it is proof the mob has to compromise. When the shoe was on the other foot, the Left suggested that the remaining Republicans commit suicide, right after murdering their families. After all, the people had spoke and the Cult was the winner.

It is why the GOP will do exactly that, compromise. I think many in the GOP admire the tenacity and togetherness of the Cult. Time and circumstance keep them on the outside, but I suspect they wish they could be in the club. Middlebrow stiffs like John Boehner look at the Cult in the same way the shopkeeper looks at the aristocrat. That’s the bait. Obama and Biden will sweet talk Boehner and McConnell into thinking this time they will get invited to the party, right after they sign off on whatever it is the Cult wants, probably amnesty.

When all hell breaks lose after the grand compromise, the rubes like Boehner will be shocked to find out that their new friends are laughing at them behind their back on the pages of the Washington Post and New York Times. Newt Gingrich was famous for falling into this trap. The pudgy dork with bad hair and the weird name always wanted to hang out with the cool kids. That was his weakness. That and donuts.

I recall John Derbyshire discussing his fondness for Anglican Hymns, despite not being an Anglican. He related a story from a friend who continued to attend regular services, despite no longer believing in God. The friend said it was out of loyalty to the old tribe. Similarly, Derb has a fondness for the Christian rituals of his people out of a loyalty to and fondness for the tradition. That, I suspect, is something all of us have for something or another in our lives. Maybe it is a holiday tradition or family tradition that no longer makes much sense or possibly never made any sense.

An example in my own life is the making of chipped beef on toast over Thanksgiving. My father loved that breakfast. It is classic enlisted man food that carried into the American working class after World War II. I have few fond memories of my father, but it reminds me of better times for some reason. It is a tradition I have upheld to this day. Again, there’s nothing rational about it, but there’s an emotional tug that is impossible to resist.

I’ve been thinking about that today as the election draws near. I have voted since I was able to vote. I’ve voted in off-year elections and municipal elections, even when the stakes were so low that barely anyone else bothered to vote. I voted in the 1990’s when it was clear to me the GOP was rejecting every lesson learned in the Reagan years and were sprinting to catch the Liberal Democrats. I voted when that stone stupid sock puppet George Bush was president. I even voted in 2008 when the choice was between a dimwitted neophyte with nothing more than race on his side and an insane old man who barely knows where he is most of the time.

In 2012 I went to my polling place with the enthusiasm of a man heading for the gallows. Romney was not much of an upgrade to Obama in my view, but I’ve had to select between worse choices. I once had Ted Kennedy as my senator and Joe Kennedy as my Congressman. Imagine that. Plus, the chance to maybe get rid of the execrable Barak Obama was something.

As I was walking in I spotted a school bus unloading a bunch of Aztecs and Mayans. An old white woman was handing them instructions and speaking to them in bad Spanish. Clearly the Democrat GOTV effort was set to eleven. Bussing in illegal aliens in a district with 99% Democrat electorate is going the extra mile.

Inside I got in-line behind a chubby white girl with a fuchsia afro and a tackle box full of metal in her face. She was furiously tapping on her phone to some other dimwit. Behind me the Mayans were filing in, jibber-jabbering to one another in Mam. The poll workers were shuffling around from station to station, doing something. Every once in a while one of them would bark out a command. The pointlessness of it was overwhelming. The nitwit in front of me and the Mayans behind would surely cancel my vote many times over. I walked out without voting.

That was the first election I had skipped as an adult and I felt bad about it, but I was done voting. It is one thing to hang with an old pointless custom out of sentimentality. It is quite another to infuriate yourself doing something you vaguely sense is doing you harm. I skipped the last primary, despite some nagging sense of obligation creeping in on me. The lack of contested races made it easier. I live in a one party state so not voting is a bit easier, but the old sense of obligation was creeping in on me again.

Still, that old sense of obligation is there. It is not that my vote counts or that I really care who wins. That’s not my fault. Forces beyond my control have made my citizenship worthless. What I can control is how I discharge my duties and obligations. That means I’ll probably stop at my polling place in the morning and cast my ballot. The choices may be awful and I may hate having to vote for any of them, but at least I will have done my duty. My country may not care much for me and citizenship may mean nothing, but I still can be a good citizen. At least I’ll have that.

Many moons ago I read Eric Hoffer’s great little book The True Believer. Hoffer was an odd guy with a mysterious back story. People just assumed he was thinking about the Nazis and their capture of Germany in the 1930’s, but no one every really knew for sure. As I said, Hoffer was an odd guy. His official biography says he was born in New York, but there’s evidence he moved to America in the 20’s or 30’s. I recall reading somewhere that he was dodgy about a lot of details, including what he had in mind when he wrote the book.

My sense is Hoffer really never had any one group in mind. He was familiar with unionists, communists, fascists, progressives of various types, as well as the full spectrum of religious types in America. Having been around working class progressives that you find in union movements, I always suspected that was his inspiration. He worked on the docks and longshoremen are unusually fanatical in their unionism. Even today these guys are the truest of true believers in the union way.

I started life around working class unionists and then moved onto ruling class progressives. That’s probably why Hoffer’s book has always resonated with me. As a kid, I’d debate with the old guys about trade unions and there was no convincing them of anything. They believed in the union and that was that. Later in life when I got around ruling class progressives, I had the same experience. Unlike the union guys, Lefty was much more ruthless when it came to the old time religion. It seemed to me that they kept an index of non-believers because once one lefty knew you were not in the faith they all seemed to know.

I was thinking about this when I saw this somewhere last week. E.J. Dionne is a B-list talking head, but a committed member of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. He’s a very smart guy, but a fanatic nonetheless. In his youth he was a rabid Catholic and then he transferred that to political liberalism. This is not uncommon, as Hoffer pointed out six decades ago. People who join mass movements tend to move from one to another as they go through life. John Podhoretz explains this phenomenon with Jews. David Horowitz noticed the same thing when writing about mid-century communists.

Dionne’s column has the usual things you see with the fanatic.

The several dozen people gathered at a street corner just off the main square of this southeastern Kansas town of 5,600 were polite and friendly in the Midwestern way. They did not look in the least like a band of counterrevolutionaries intent on reversing the direction of the government in Topeka.

Yet the results of the tea party rebellion four years ago have led these civic-minded, middle-of-the-road Kansans to a quiet but fierce determination to take their state back from those who once talked incessantly about taking their country back.

What brought them together this week was a visit from Paul Davis, the Democratic candidate for governor. Davis has generally been running ahead of Republican incumbent Sam Brownback in one of the country’s most consequential showdowns on Tuesday’s ballot.

For reasons I’ve never quite understood, the Cult has an obsession with Kansas. I suspect they look as Kansas as typically American. If they can succeed there, it validates a big chunk of their mythology. After all, they are members of the vanguard leading the people to the promised land.

Brownback set things up this way by launching what he called, proudly and unapologetically, a “real, live experiment” that he hoped would provide a model of red-state governance. He pushed steep income and business tax cuts through the legislature, insisting that his program would spur unprecedented economic growth. The results have been less than inspiring: large budget deficits, credit downgrades and substantial cuts in education spending, some of which were reversed only because of a court order. Only rarely does an election pose such a clear philosophical and policy choice.

Brownback often cited low-tax Texas as his model, prompting a ready reply from Davis. Voters “don’t want to be like Texas,” he said in an interview at his storefront headquarters here. “They just want to be Kansas.”

What it means to be Kansas is precisely what’s at stake, and it’s why Davis’s campaign uses #RestoreKansas — a traditionalist’s slogan, when you think about it — as its Twitter battle cry. The choice Davis is offering is not between liberalism and conservatism but rather between two kinds of conservatism: the deeply anti-government tea party kind, and an older variety that values prudence and fiscal restraint but also expects government to provide, as Davis put it, “the basic services that are essential to the state’s vitality.”

Setting Brownback up as a Tea Party guy is necessary to make this election fit the narrative. Brownback is a conventional Republican. Similarly, the Democrat must be cast as an earthy, tribune of the people. Davis is a career hack and about as populist as Mr. Burns from the Simpsons. None of this really matters as the fanatic only sees what confirms his fanaticism. In this case, lunatics like Dionne imagine a world where entitled snobs like themselves are saving the rubes from the clutches of the non-believers they call the Tea Party.

I’ve noticed Hoffer getting mentioned more often by popular writers who are either rediscovering him or learning about him for the first time. There was a Hoffer revival in the late 70’s and early 80’s too. I suspect it corresponds to the waning of a liberal cycle. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Americans would go through periods of religiosity. When Christianity began to fade in the 20th century, this cycle transferred to the new religion of America. Now we have periods of Progressive Awakening. My hunch is the rediscovery of Eric Hoffer corresponds with the waning of a Progressive revival.