The basic problem with the two party system is that when one party goes massively, rat-chokingly insane, you’re pretty much forced to go with the sane candidate. “Sane” is a low bar for public office. It includes the subsets of the sane-but-stupid, sane-but-criminal, and the sane-but-disagrees-for-everything-you-stand-for. For example, here in the ninth district I get to choose between Rick Boucher, a Democrat who voted against health care reform and thinks Arizona’s immigration laws are a peachy idea, and Morgan Griffith, a friend of the Roanoke Tea Party.

I can’t say I’m happy about my options.

The other problem is that the presence of two drastically opposing sides causes the middle to shift. When you have left-moderates and right-extremists, the center moves to the right. But when you have sane vs. crazy, the center moves to the crazy.

I sympathise with S.C. representative Bob Inglis — a man I no doubt disagree with enormously — for having to face this in his own party:

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there’s a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life’s earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, “What the heck are you talking about?” I’m trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, “You don’t know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don’t know this?!” And I said, “Please forgive me. I’m just ignorant of these things.” And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow. Confessions of a Tea Party Casualty

It’s one thing to take a different side. It’s another to weigh anchor and leave reality on the horizon, which is what the “socialist” talk is about:

They would ask me if [Obama] was a socialist, and I would always find some other word. I’d say, “President Obama wants a very large government that I don’t think will work and that spends too much and it’s inefficient and it compromises freedom and it’s not the way we want to go.” They would listen for the word, wait to see if I used the s-word, and when I didn’t, you could see the disappointment.

It’s not enough for Obama to be politically opposed to their values; he has to be apocalyptically opposed to their values. He has to be a socialist crypto-muslim. And if you disagree with that, well, no matter what your voting record is, you’re just too liberal.

How do you argue against crazy? How do you run against crazy? I don’t think you can. All I think you can do is hope that crazy hasn’t moved far enough into the middle to have a chance.