By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
Before we get to the punditry and other musings, let’s
start with some etymological tomfoolery. The term “lunatic fringe” originated
as a term for a hairstyle. Young ladies who cut their hair straight across the
top—i.e. women with bangs—were said to be sporting a “lunatic fringe.” The
reason? Residents of insane asylums—aka lunatics—would have their hair cut that
way (prison inmates, too). It was also called the “idiot fringe” or “convict
style” for the same reason.
The modern connotation of “lunatic fringe,” meaning
ideologically radical zealots and weirdos, came a bit later. Teddy Roosevelt
popularized this use. He gave a famous speech in 1913 at an art
exhibition at the New York Armory in which he used the phrase to describe
avant-garde artists and then drew a parallel to politics. After praising all of
the cutting-edge art at the exhibition, Roosevelt added:
For all of this there can be only hearty
praise. But this does not in the least mean that the extremists whose paintings
and pictures were represented are entitled to any praise, save, perhaps, that
they have helped to break fetters. Probably in any reform movement, any
progressive movement, in any field of life, the penalty for avoiding the
commonplace is a liability to extravagance. It is vitally necessary to move
forward and to shake off the dead hand, often the fossilized dead hand, of the
reactionaries; and yet we have to face the fact that there is apt to be a
lunatic fringe among the votaries of any forward movement.
Okay, hold that thought. I gotta squeeze in some
punditry.
The Manhattan Institute has released an interesting new report. It’s the follow-up to the survey it did on the GOP in December,
which looked at who makes up the party’s new coalition. This one looks at the
Democrats. I’ve heard people have quibbled about the methodology and
assumptions of both reports. But, without getting into all of that, I think both
are perfectly serviceable discussion documents, offering a meaningful snapshot
of the makeup of both parties. In other words, I think there’s ample fluidity
in attitudes. For instance, if you did the GOP survey today, the segments of
the Republican coalition would look a bit different, given Trump’s
deteriorating approval ratings, the Iran war, the immigration enforcement
operations in Minneapolis and related killings, etc. But the basic divisions
along generational, ideological, and demographic lines are still useful. To
paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you do the punditry with the data you have, not the
data you might want.
The upshot of the latest survey is that most Democrats
aren’t the America-hating, left-wing fanatics that Donald Trump or various Fox
News talking heads shine a light on. Similarly, the GOP coalition is less
dominated by the Christian nationalists, groypers, and whack jobs many
Democrats and the folks at MS NOW signal-boost as representative of all
Republicans. But it’s also true that both fringes do exist and have
outsized influence. In other words, both sides exaggerate the role of the
crazies on the other side and minimize the extent of craziness on their
own side, but both sides do in fact have crazies in their ranks, and the
non-crazy mainstreams of both parties are too accommodating of them.
The Manhattan Institute report finds that about 11
percent of Democrats identify ideologically with what the report terms the Woke
Fringe. Here’s how the report puts it:
The Woke Fringe (11% of the
Democratic coalition)—voters who describe themselves as a “Democratic
Socialist” or “Communist.”
The Woke Fringe stands apart
demographically and attitudinally. It is the youngest faction, with an average
age of 43 and seven in ten members under the age of 50. It is the group with
the fewest Hispanics (6%) but the largest proportion of black (22%) and Asian
voters (7); 60% are white. This group is more likely to live in urban areas,
particularly in the Northeast. Ideologically, it is the most consistently
left-leaning faction, with a majority identifying as “very left-leaning.”
Members of this group are also significantly more likely than other Democrats
to report poor mental health (25%), compared to the other groups (14% for
Moderates, 16% Progressive Liberals.)
You know my basic view of both parties. They’re too
internally democratic—TLDR: primaries suck—and they are too institutionally
weak to do the admittedly hard, but obviously smart, thing: purge or
marginalize their fringes in an unapologetic campaign to win over the voters in
the middle.
As a purely political matter (we can leave policy and
morality out of it for the moment), the reason such a purge would be smart for
Democrats—or Republicans—is simply that there are more voters in the middle
than there are on the fringes. Moreover, the more “normie” voters you get, the
more fringy you make the other party look. Enduring majorities are built
on this basic logic.
The main reason it’s hard is that those on the fringe—and
the fringe-sympathetic—care more about politics and take politics more
seriously than normal voters who, broadly speaking, have more important and
rewarding things to do with their time and energy. (The suits at The
Dispatch often call these normies, or “our audience.”) The
fringers have more internal power within the parties and the network of
institutions that fund and support them (with media coverage, donations,
organization, and mobilization).
An additional challenge is negative polarization and
hyper-partisanship. Attacking members of your own “team” outrages even very
moderate members of your coalition. J.D. Vance’s anti-anti-Nazi schtick is one
variant of this. The left’s longstanding love affair with popular frontism and
its outrage at “hippie punching”—i.e., criticizing the left instead of aiming
all hostilities rightward—is another. Lots of normie Democrats and Republicans
simply hate the other party so much these days that they confuse internal
hygiene and sanity with “divisiveness” and “cancel culture.” This logic is all
very stupid, but its practitioners make it sound very sophisticated (charges of
hypocrisy and double standards are a key tool for enforcing cohesion: “How dare
they criticize our whack jobs when they don’t criticize their own! I won’t give
them the satisfaction of denouncing someone on my team.”).
What interests me about the Democrats is where their
fringe comes from. You’ve heard me channel Yuval Levin many times about how
institutions mold character. The lazy or louche hippie gets sent to the Marines
and comes out the other side a straight-backed, disciplined young man. The
self-involved kid joins the Boy Scouts and comes out helping old ladies with
their groceries.
I’ve long argued that elite universities play a similar
function for progressive ideologues. Now, it’s not the case that everyone who
goes to Brown or Yale comes out a social justice warrior. But for a lot of
young people, that is exactly what happens. Pick certain classes, fall under
the sway of a particular mentor, land in the right (or wrong) crowd, and you
come out with expectations and ideological commitments that are downright
fringy. Some kids go into college seeking that stuff—and they find it. Others
get converted to it.
But it’s not just a matter of ideological indoctrination.
The institution itself breeds certain ways of thinking. When I used to do a lot
of campus speaking, I’d have great fun poking at this thinking. College kids,
particularly ones with affluent parents who don’t need to work their way
through school, tend to think they’re incredibly independent.
This is understandable. For most attendees, college is
the first extended period of being on your own, away from parents and the
expectations of friends and family. You have to make your own way to class. You
pick your courses. You rise and sleep on your own schedule and eat and drink as
you want. But ye gods, you’re not independent. Nearly everything is
provided for you. Someone else shops for your food, prepares it, and cleans up
after you. Campus security protects you. Describe college life to a middle-aged
professional and it sounds a lot more like a vacation, a bougie rumspringa,
than a serious burden.
I think that for a serious fraction of college
graduates—especially, but not solely, the fringers—they internalize the idea
that this is how life is supposed to work. The government should act
like university administrators on a national scale. It should enforce diversity
and police affronts to one’s self-esteem. It should ensure that everyone gets
to “be who they want to be.” Psychologically and sociologically, this is why so
many progressives go to graduate school. They want to keep the idyll going, to
extend their stay in Shangri-la.
When they eventually go out into the real world, they
gravitate toward organizations and vocations that are closest to the campus
mindset—nonprofits, the media, activist groups, education, government, public
sector unions, and the Democratic Party. This ecosystem is very
insular and self-reinforcing. Politicians tend to reflect the attitudes of the
audiences they speak to, and the feedback they get from those audiences tends
toward a worldview that says America should be like one vast college campus,
where you don’t worry about health insurance, saving money, forming a family,
or hard work that you don’t enjoy.
I still chuckle at one of the arguments that Nancy Pelosi
made for passing Obamacare. With the Affordable Care Act, she explained, you’ll
be freed from being “job-locked.” Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the
idea of decoupling health insurance from your employer. Employer-sponsored
health insurance was a World War II-era innovation at a time when wages were
frozen, so employers started offering it as an alternative form of
compensation.
But when making her argument, Pelosi said that once free
from job-lock you’ll be free to do whatever you want, including “write poetry.” People who really love writing poetry have
always been free to do so. What Pelosi was appealing to is the idea that the
government should free you from the burdens of work so you can indulge your
heart’s desires. I don’t think Pelosi is a Marxist, but this is a very Marxish
idea. Here’s how Karl put it:
For as soon as the distribution
of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of
activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a
hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he
does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society,
where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become
accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production
and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow,
to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,
criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter,
fisherman, herdsman or critic.
Now, this G-File is getting long, and my plane is
about to land in Dallas, so let me see if I can land the former before the
pilots handle the latter.
Obviously, there’s a lot of generalization here. And we
should be fair to the non-college-educated left-wing lunatic fringe, which
punches above its weight. And since I’m offering clean-up caveats, I should
also note that there are plenty of right-wing lunatics who are shaped by their
college experiences in unhelpful ways (trolling gets rewarded in college, too).
Regardless, I think it’s useful to think about how
certain institutions mold characters that are fit for one institution but
problematic for another. The example that comes most immediately to mind is
fascism. Benito Mussolini saw fascism as a way of extending the “socialism of
the trenches” he experienced during World War I. He was hardly alone. Whether
you call it fascism, militarism, or simply esprit de corps, history is
full of intellectuals and political leaders who thought they could take their
experience in the military and graft it onto government.
But that’s not the only example. The clichés about
running government like a business rest on the same sort of assumptions. Heck,
right now we’re experimenting with reality show and cable news hosts running
the country and taking us to war.
Once you start looking for it, it’s a pattern going back
centuries (I’ll spare you my deeper-cut historical riffs on Jansenism,
Puritanism, and the Cluniac Reforms). People from one kind of institution think
they can make government and politics operate by the same rules as that
institution and under the same assumptions, if they’re given power.
Anyway, my basic point is that people with bangs are
crazy. No, wait—that’s not it.
The problem with the phrase “lunatic fringe” or even
“fringe” is that it assumes that members of the fringe are on the outskirts,
the periphery, of politics. But that’s not the case. In the GOP, lunatics run
several very important wings of the asylum. In the Democratic Party, the
lunatics are often lionized as heroes who symbolize the core values of the
party, or the left.
I guess the point, or at least a point, is that
government in a free society is an institution like no other and cannot be
meaningfully run like a business, the military, or a college campus without
society losing some of its freedom. We need politicians who know what
government is for and, relatedly, who know what it can and cannot do. Political
parties are supposed to help such politicians get elected and to govern.
Parties won’t be able to do that until they figure out a way to make “fringe”
mean something again.
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