I’m tempted to say something like, “Just when you thought they couldn’t be any more frightened … .” But when it comes to today’s conservatives the fear factor has no reverse gear. It only accelerates forward. For politicians like truly loathsome Eric Cantor, fear is what propelled their career, and for the even more fear-struck voters in his carefully gerrymandered district who threw him out of office last night, fear — lacquered in a farcically distorted righteousness — is the staple of their informational diet. Paranoid-filled coconuts for the culturally marooned.

Fear the “illegals”, (i.e. “everyone who isn’t as white as we are”). Fear and arm yourselves against “street crime”, (i.e. “people who aren’t as white as we are and who are violent for different reasons than us”.) Resist anything — anything — suggested by Barack Obama, (i.e. “a guy who is both not white and clearly … “, well, you get the idea.)

If you’re a fan of Chuck Todd’s morning show, Cantor’s opponent, college professor/economist Dave Brat, was on both yesterday and today and couldn’t sound more like a very poor (old and white) man’s echo of Newt Gingrich. Begging off a question as simple as, “What do you mean by ‘amnesty’?”, on the grounds, he said, that it wasn’t one of the “important issues”, Brat’s standard rhetorical technique is to drop the names of James Madison and other Constitutional leaders into every other sentence. If he was ordering at the Taco Bell drive through it’d sound like this: “Good morning, American! I’d like to exercise my right, as provided by James Madison, to enjoy the freedom of a burrito supreme with extra sour cream and then eat it in a place of my choosing without fear of federal oppression.”

Brat’s appeal, like Gingrich’s and Paul Ryan’s, is that he is what not-so-bright people think a smart guy sounds like. A frappe of grandiloquent slogans and catch-phrases amid constant reminders of imminent peril to body and soul. Brat — with enormous help from talk radio — actually benefited from the assertion that Eric Cantor — Eric friggin’ Cantor — was too cozy with Barack Obama. That’s how cluelessly angry Republican voters are in Virginia’s Seventh. (Not that that is unrepresentative of the Tea Party everywhere else.)

Given the effort Cantor went to to wall his district off from any Democratic voter, Brat is dead certain to be elected in the fall. (His “liberal” challenger is another professor from the same college.)

But that same deep-Tea Party base exclusivity is also a reason there may be a false message here. Gun-crazy Ayn Randers will certainly be ermboldened by Cantor’s defeat, (look out Thad Cochran in Mississippi), but in any race outside the Laura Ingraham/Mark Levin inflated talk radio bubble, Tea Party nuttery and paranoia is a catalyst for the rational-minded. Drop a nattering demagogue like Brat into any contest with a viable alternative and the rather sizeable chunk of the population repulsed by Eric Cantor’s greasy, big money/faux populist obstructionism will stampede to the polls.

The obvious peril — a fear-inducing peril to be sure — is that that there has been so much gerrymandering of “safe” Republican districts, invariably away from urban areas and toward heavily white rural enclaves, an emboldened Tea Party, (and their fear has them in a state of constant high agitation) could actually increase its strangehold over what’s left of the GOP this fall. That would — if it were possible after the most do-nothing Congress in generations — create even more gridlock in D.C.

… which is what James Madison would say is what “the people”
want.

– Brian Lambert