The urge to vote for the outsider—the dissenter, the maverick, the troublemaker hated by those elites—is a reasonable one. Political parties become stale and predictable, their officeholders self-seeking and cowardly. The ordinary voter, exasperated by his elected leaders’ inability or refusal to act on their professed ideals, turns to the outsider in the hope that even if he makes a mess, he’ll at least disrupt the system.
Trying to remedy the nation’s politics and government by electing such figures brings a certain emotional satisfaction. It can be great fun watching the elite throw tantrums. But electing the outsider brings two serious problems. First, he doesn’t know what he’s doing and his role as the scourge of elites won’t allow him to admit this reality. Second, there’s no end to it. Once you get a taste for this sort of candidate, you’ll vote for another screwball, then another, and very soon the entire political sphere descends into a madcap brawl over symbols and personalities.
If that’s a more or less accurate assessment of the last two years in American politics, we’re now in the full-on brawl stage. A plurality of Alabama Republicans nominated Roy Moore, a judge famously removed, twice, from his office as chief justice of the Alabama supreme court, as their candidate in the upcoming election to fill Jeff Sessions’s Senate seat. Moore’s appeal lay mainly in his promise to offend the sensibilities of the great and the good in Washington. He has a talent for saying things that incense the elite—that “the transgenders don’t have rights,” that parts of Illinois and Indiana are under sharia law—but he is not otherwise accomplished. He is a small, countrified Trump.
Now Moore faces credible accusations that he preyed on underage girls, and his circumlocutory denials seem to confirm the allegations’ truth. They won’t end his candidacy, however, because the people who invested most heavily in outsiderism and the benefits of “disruption” can’t bring themselves to believe what everybody else can see clearly: that they’ve backed a fraud. Thus Fox News host Sean Hannity at first credited Moore’s claim that it was all a big lie, then halfheartedly justified the judge’s taste for younger ladies, then demanded the truth from Moore, and in the end shrugged the whole thing off on the grounds that “it shouldn’t be decided by me”—a claim that is hard to dispute but hard to believe, given the many things he believes should be decided by him.
Washington has long attached too much importance to the willingness to condemn famous people who’ve said or done reprehensible things—as if one’s capacity to condemn were an indication of merit or courage. We understand that.
We understand, too, that there was never any hope of persuading President Trump to disavow his support for Moore. The president, as he amply proved in his responses to the Charlottesville riots last August, is constitutionally incapable of condemning anyone, no matter how awful, who has praised Donald J. Trump.
But there is no conceivable reason any other public figure associated with conservatism or the Republican party should have any trouble denouncing a candidate for the U.S. Senate who, in addition to everything else, threw himself at underage girls when he was a public official twice their age. And yet lots of such people can’t do it. Right-wing talk radio hosts would rather insist that Bill Clinton did worse. The president’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, can’t bring himself to withdraw his support for Moore. An encouraging number of Republicans in Congress have issued condemnations of one kind or another, but a few are silent, and the Alabama GOP still supports the man.
This sudden addiction to troublemaking has been called “populism,” and maybe it is. The populisms of the past, however, had content—a set of ideas or ideals, however imperfectly expressed. The new populism looks like nothing more than a perverse need to outrage the nation’s bien pensants.
Alabama Republicans and their enablers have turned an easy win into a likely loss. Such is the wisdom of outsiderism. Rather than concocting zany plans to keep the seat in the “R” column, however, they might consider the importance of fielding competent and grown-up candidates.
