Sam Tanenhaus is back. In 2009 he called Republicans moribund as they geared up for their 2010 comeback. And in 2013 he called them the “white people’s party” as they were about to elect a new cohort of non-whites and women. This time he has an assessment of the Republicans as a bomb-throwing, dangerous and bellicose party that is still more unhinged than the last two, and perhaps just as untethered to reality.

The claim this time is that the current generation of GOP interventionists descend not from those of the World War II era, but from the pre-World War II isolationists who were converted by the emergence of the communists as a more dangerous enemy than the Nazis.