Stuck With the Kooks

The Republican Party, in making their deal with the devil, find themselves unable to purge the crazies. 

When an ideological extreme faction with unpopular views emerges, it becomes a threat to the party that hosts it. At first, the party’s incentive is to banish the extremists, lest their toxic ideas taint the party’s brand with the broader electorate. But if the radical faction’s growth is not arrested, the calculus changes, and barring the doors can no longer work. It forms a large enough part of the base that the party can’t afford to alienate its members. The crank wing becomes too big to fail.

The most telling gauge of the anti-vaxx movement’s progress is the waning resistance from the party mainstream. Republicans have tried to channel anti-vaccine activism into narrower resistance to government mandates of the vaccine. This has the advantage of appealing to a broader share of the public (depending on the exact framing, between one-third and one-half of Americans oppose mandates, much larger than the one-fifth that opposes vaccines themselves.) It also comfortably locates the issue within the traditional bounds of individual liberty and restricted government power, without requiring any uncomfortable defense of pseudoscientific gibberish.

Insisting DeSantis is pro-vaccine because he endorsed it last year? Check. Pretending his opposition to vaccines is limited to mandates, while ignoring his open embrace of anti-vaccine nuts? Check. Leaning heavily on the bad data about Florida’s supposedly high vaccination rate? Check.

If the goal is to elect a Republican at any cost, it may work. The flaw is that it surrenders any leverage the party elite has against the anti-vaxxers. Their only tool is increasingly comic levels of denial, like western communists in the 1930s who didn’t want to hear about purges or prison camps in their socialist paradise.

Conservatives have a founding myth centered on William F. Buckley supposedly purging the John Birch society from the movement. (In fact his main goal was to keep the Birchers in the tent while nudging aside the group’s embarrassing president.) As the conservative movement gained full control over the Republican Party, the party lost whatever ability it had to sift crackpots from its ranks.