> I have an honest question. It may sound goading, and I don't mean it
> to be.
>
> The shock troops of the right has always been their crazies, which
> right wing intellectuals and party figures encourage and play to (to
> varying degrees, depending on the decade).
>
> If the left is to take a page out of their book, it would seem to mean
> unleashing and encouraging the left wing version of such crazies.
>
> But whenever crowds on the left start to get excited about even mildly
> crazy TP-type stuff -- "corporate personhood" or "moving money" to
> take two recent and exceedingly mild examples -- you and Doug -- the
> two guys who seem most to yearn that we could have something like the
> right has -- are first in line to hose them down.
I see what you mean, but I don't think there's any contradiction between wanting the "progressives" to get stronger than the "centrists" and wanting the progressives to get less dumb. Actually, the National Review crowd faced exactly the same problem in the early 60's. How they winced at the nonsense their grassroots allies would come up with - e.g., fluoridation of the water. In the end, they managed to exercise enough intellectual leadership to subordinate that stuff to a less frivolous program. I also think the left is somehow different from the right. If the there were a left surge it would be focused on some real movement somewhere (not just some ponytailed, t-shirt wearing fanatics), which would impart a measure of seriousness to the larger enterprise. I don't know, I'm just speculating.
SA