Collective Conscious

Every time a lib­eral com­men­ta­tor has a bad dream about con­ser­v­a­tive ide­ol­ogy, he wakes up and tweets or blogs about it. Gen­er­ally, it’s only a mat­ter of time until a right-​​wing com­men­ta­tor vin­di­cates it and tries to tell the lib­eral that his dream was really a good dream, now just go ahead and go back to sleep. Here’s the bad dream, Rand Paul edi­tion:

Rand Paul’s views on the Civil Rights Act and the Con­gress’ Com­merce Clause pow­ers are not fringe Repub­li­can views. They are main­stream Repub­li­can views.

And this is why the night­mare isn’t over:

The funny thing is that in the 1960s, men like William F. Buck­ley, Jr., Barry Gold­wa­ter, and Ronald Rea­gan opposed the title of the Civil Rights Act that con­sti­tuted fed­eral overreach.

Yes, you read that cor­rectly. It’s almost as if the right scours left-​​leaning blogs for intel­lec­tual posi­tions that lib­er­als have already decried as abhor­rent and proven absurd, and then adopt them just to drive us crazy. For­tu­nately, these posi­tions also drive away most sen­si­ble inde­pen­dents — and in Novem­ber we’ll see just what they have wrought.