Heather Digby Parton is one of those low-watt moonbats we saw popping up on our screens regularly in the last decade, when the great tide of Progressive lunacy was reaching its high. Sites like Kos, Media Matters and Salon were home to these folks, organizing conferences and promoting their hooting and bellowing. Together, they formed the deranged choir that backed the post-modern sermons of Barak Obama.

According to Mx. Parton, she has traveled her whole life as an army brat. My bet is the phrase “citizen of the world” crosses her lips quite often. I’d also bet she still talks about how much she hated her parents. Modern Progressivism is mostly just mild individual psychosis scaled up to a mass movement.

Anyway, she has an hysterical rant in Salon telling her coreligionists they must rally to thwart the looming evil that is Ben Carson.

But what if neither Trump nor Carson are popular because of their personalities? What if the beltway consensus that Trump’s success isn’t based upon issues or ideology is wrong and voters are actually attracted to his crazy ideas on the merits? The fact that Carson is closing on him certainly lends credibility to that possibility, because despite his mild-mannered persona, Carson’s ideas are even more extreme than Trump’s.

The two top contenders for the Republican nomination have nothing in common in terms of style, but among a very big field they are the two with the most radical agendas, and, as Salon’s Simon Maloy pointed out recently, a common disdain for what they term “political correctness.” As uncomfortable as it may be to think about, maybe Republican voters aren’t just looking for someone to express their rage. Maybe they really are extremists.

Most conservatives have misunderstood this weird use of the word “extremist” by Progressives. The assumption is that these people are far out on the fringe such that normal looks radical to them. In reality they are not speaking to the bad whites. They are speaking to their alternatives in the Yankee Coalition. By attaching an idea to the bad whites, they hope to scare the more reticent members of the Yankee Coalition.

I think everyone is familiar with Trump’s agenda. For starters he’s going to round up and deport all the undocumented immigrants, build a wall on the border with a beautiful door and make Mexico pay for it, start trade wars with China and Japan, and when it comes to ISIS he has said:

“They have great money because they have oil. Every place where they have oil I would knock the hell out of them. I would knock out the source of their wealth, the primary sources of their wealth, which is oil. And in order to do that, you would have to put boots on the ground. I would knock the hell out of them but I’d put a ring around it and I’d take the oil for our country.”

Carson’s ideas are no less out in right field: He would use drones on the border to blow up caves where he believes immigrants are hiding. He believes that Planned Parenthood was created to commit genocide on African Americans. He has said that Obamacare is the worst thing to happen since slavery. And he believes that prohibitions against torture and war crimes are P.C. foolishness:

“Our military needs to know that they’re not going be prosecuted when they come back, because somebody has said, ‘You did something that was politically incorrect. There is no such thing as a politically correct war. We need to grow up, we need to mature. If you’re gonna have rules for war, you should just have a rule that says no war. Other than that, we have to win. Our life depends on it.”
So, the two most popular candidates in the Republican race for president are as different as can be when in comes to personality and style. One is a monumental blowhard billionaire and the other is a diffident brain surgeon.  But it’s not the way Trump and Carson speak or the style with which they present themselves that has the base so dazzled. These voters agree with the substance of what these two are saying. And they are both certifiable extremists. Maybe it’s time for the political establishment to reconsider their view that this phenomenon doesn’t amount to anything more than a political tantrum and take these people seriously.

Putting aside the characterization of the positions, what you see here is a not a message to the other loonies on the Left. This is the sort of thing your crazy liberal sister is going to be saying at Thanksgiving. “Have you heard what Carson said about abortion? Only Bible-thumping crazies believe that sort of stuff. Surely you don’t agree with those people.”

There’s a lot of denial going in in the ruling coalition. On the Left, they have been in the pumpkin patch for seven years now and they have little to show for it. They have to look at the Hillary – Sanders thing and be terrified. Worse yet, they assumed old friend Jeb Bush was going to cruise to victory and now that’s looking grim.

On the other side of the coalition, the GOP establishment similarly thought this was going to be a fun walk to victory. Even if their guy (Jeb Bush) was not going to fly, they had Kasich, Rubio and Walker in reserve. Now that none of these guys can draw flies and some of them are objects of hostility by voters, they don’t know what to do. Panic is setting on on both sides of the Yankee Coalition.