Left-Wing McCarthyism in Virginia

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“McCarthyism” is a term of art in American politics. Coined during the ascendancy of U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) between 1950 and 1954, it originally meant targeting politicians, government officials, celebrities, educators and others with flimsy, out-of-context evidence to indicate they were either active participants in or unwitting dupes of the “international Communist conspiracy.” McCarthyism actually pre-dated McCarthy. Republican politicians had been attacking Franklin Roosevelt’s and Congressional Democrats’ New Deal programs as Communist-inspired since the late 1930’s. The end of World War II, the almost simultaneous start of the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the abrupt switch in the U.S. government’s “party line” in which the Soviets morphed from valiant wartime ally to bitter enemy of all we believed in and held dear just added fuel to the fire.

Though McCarthy died in 1957 and the “international Communist conspiracy” died with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Right-wing McCarthyism is alive and well. We saw quite a lot of it in the 2016 Presidential campaign and particularly in the conspiracy-mongering around Hillary Clinton, who was portrayed by her opponents as so unremittingly evil the Wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs looked like Mother Teresa by comparison. But there is also a Left-wing McCarthyism, which uses the same tactics as the Right-wing version — conspiracy-mongering, guilt by association and reaching into the farthest-back records of their targets’ behavior to slam them no matter how remote this may be to who they are and how they behave now — and, if anything, is even less fair and more destructive to its victims than the Right-wing version.

As I write, Left-wing McCarthyism has virtually destroyed the Democratic Party in Virginia. The flame was lit, ironically enough, by a Right-wing blogger, Patrick Howley, who as a former editor and reporter for the Daily Caller and Breitbart News is the sort of person who’s keeping the flame of Right-wing McCarthyism alive. Howley was determined to find something on Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, to stop Northam’s attempt to liberalize Virginia’s ultra-strict abortion laws. Under its previous Republican government, Virginia had gone so far out of its way to stop women from having abortions that they had passed a law requiring any woman seeking an abortion to undergo an invasive transvaginal exam first. Northam was determined to end this nonsense and restore reproductive freedom to Virginia’s women — and Howley and other Right-wingers were equally anxious to find dirt on Northam and other elected Democrats to stop him.

Howley got his chance when someone — “a concerned citizen, not a political opponent,” he told Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi for a story published there (https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-tip-from-a-concerned-citizen-helps-a-reporter-land-the-scoop-of-a-lifetime/2019/02/03/e30762ea-2765-11e9-ad53-824486280311_story.html?noredirect=on) and in the Los Angeles Times February 3 — sent him a copy of a page from Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook, published in 1984. The page contained a photo of two figures, a young man dressed in blackface and one in a Ku Klux Klan outfit, complete with hood covering the head. The text on the page didn’t explain the context of this image or what it was intended to convey.

But it sparked precisely the reaction Howley was undoubtedly hoping for when he released it. The head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other prominent African-American political and community leaders immediately denounced Northam as a racist and called on him to resign. So did a lot of other people, including white Democratic politicians in Virginia and nationwide. The gravamen of the charge against Northam seemed to be that posing in blackface for a college yearbook photo irrevocably marked Northam as a racist, and was so far beyond the pale that nothing he’s done in his life since could atone for it.

One Black woman on MS-NBC said that by posing for that photo, Northam had not only associated himself with but taken personal responsibility for every horrible thing that white Americans have done to African-Americans since first bringing them to this country as slaves exactly 400 years ago. Another commentator, an African-American man, compared Northam’s photo to D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, an aesthetic masterpiece (easily the finest film ever made to that time) and a political horror which portrays the Black politicians who came to power in the South during the post-Civil War Reconstruction period (1865-1877) as incompetent drunks and louts manipulated by unscrupulous white Northerners, and the Ku Klux Klan as heroes riding to the rescue of the decent (white) South and taking the votes and the guns away from the terrible Black monsters (all of whom were played, by the way, by white actors in blackface).

Northam’s response to the accusation didn’t help. At first he did the right thing: on the afternoon the scandal broke, February 1, he owned up to it and said he was “deeply sorry for the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo and for the hurt that decision caused then and now.” The next day, though, he gave a bizarre press conference, flanked by his wife, in which he said he wasn’t either of the two people in the photo, though he said that he had worn blackface on another occasion, a party in 1984 in which he darkened his skin to participate in — and win — a Michael Jackson impersonation contest. (I couldn’t help but savor the irony that he darkened his skin to look like Michael Jackson, given Jackson’s own well-documented racial transformation in the other direction.) He even offered to show the reporters his rendition of Jackson’s famous “moonwalk” dance, until his wife blessedly talked him out of it by saying it would be “inappropriate.”

The Right Scores a Second Scalp

At the time, some of the people leading the charge against Northam — mainly the Black ones — said it didn’t matter politically if Northam resigned because there was a fine, intelligent, popular, charismatic leader in line to succeed him: Virginia’s African-American lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax. But then Right-wing blogger Patrick Howley struck again and nailed a second Virginia Democrat’s scalp to the wall. On February 4, he released another bombshell, this one attacking Fairfax and claiming that he had sexually assaulted a woman at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

“Imagine you were sexually assaulted during the DNC convention in Boston in 2004 by a campaign staffer,” said the post on Howley’s Big League Politics site, attributing the quote to the alleged victim, Scripps College professor Vanessa Tyson. “You spend the next 13 years trying to forget it ever happened. Until one day you find out he’s the Democratic candidate for statewide office in a state 3,000 miles away, and he wins that election in November 2017. Then by strange, horrible luck, it seems increasingly likely that he’ll get a VERY BIG promotion.” The Big League Politics post didn’t mention Fairfax’s name as Tyson’s assaulter, but it contained enough biographical details it wasn’t hard to figure out he was the accused.

Fairfax immediately denied the accusation, saying that he and Tyson had had sex but it was completely consensual. Tyson appeared publicly and said that when Fairfax started kissing her it was consensual, but he then forced himself on her against her will. Then another alleged victim, Meredith Watson, released a statement through an attorney that said Fairfax had out-and-out raped her when they were both students at Duke University in 2000. Unlike Tyson, Watson had contemporary corroboration for her story: Kaneedreck Adams, a neighbor of Watson’s in 2000 who told the Washington Post that Watson had disclosed the rape just after it happened. “She was upset,” Adams said. “She told me she had been raped and she named Justin.”

Coming on top of the attacks against Northam, the charges against Fairfax put the Virginia Democrats in much the same position the Republican caucus of the U.S. Senate was in when allegations of sexual assault surfaced against then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The Republicans in the Senate basically rallied around Kavanaugh and voted to confirm him. But Democrats, far more reliant on the support of women and people of color than Republicans, face a very different political calculus.

As Vox reporter Anna North summed it up at the end of her February 4 article on the Fairfax scandal (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/4/18210638/justin-fairfax-ralph-northam-virginia-sex-assault-allegation), “Historically, Democrats have responded far more aggressively to allegations of sexual misconduct than Republicans have. But this situation is new, and it is unclear how the party will respond. Whatever happens, however, will set a standard for how Democrats confront sexual misconduct accusations even when they come from an adversarial source — and when they concern a rising star who looked like he could help lead his party out of a crisis.”

Dems’ Virginia Success Turns to Ashes

It’s harder to dismiss the charges against Fairfax — and the calls from Virginia legislators, Democrats as well as Republicans, for him to resign (and face impeachment if he doesn’t) — as Left-wing McCarthyism as it is the ones against Northam. Northam is accused of pulling a stupid, racially insensitive prank in his college years, while Fairfax is accused of serious crimes against actual, identifiable victims. But the result could be to strip Virginia Democrats of their historic victories in the state’s last two elections and hand control of it back to the Republicans.

If both Northam and Fairfax resign or are removed from office, the third in line for the governorship of Virginia is the state’s Democratic attorney general, Mark Herring. But he has recently admitted that he donned blackface during his college years. If he goes, too — and it’s hard to believe that he can survive in office if Northam resigns for doing the same thing — the fourth in line and the person who will become Virginia governor is Kirk Cox, speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates — a Republican.

One tragedy in all this is that until the scandals broke, Virginia had been one of the Democrats’ few recent success stories in the South. In the 2016 and 2018 elections, Virginia stood out as a stark contrast to the shellacking Democrats were getting through the rest of the South. Tim Kaine easily won re-election to the U.S. Senate from Virginia even as incumbent Democratic Senators Bill Nelson in Florida and Claire McCaskill in Missouri (a state that didn’t secede during the Civil War but is still sociologically and ideologically “Southern”) were voted out of office. While Beto O’Rourke was losing his heavily hyped challenge to Texas Senator Ted Cruz by a double-digit margin and African-American Democrats Andrew Gillum and Stacey Abrams were narrowly losing their gubernatorial bids in Florida and Georgia, Virginia voters elected Democrats to statewide office and narrowed the Republican majorities in the state legislature from 2-1 to virtual ties.

Indeed, one state legislative race in Virginia was so close it literally was a tie. Kirk Cox got exactly as many votes for the Virginia House of Delegates as his Democratic opponent, and he was literally elected by the toss of a coin. Now, thanks to the Left-wing McCarthyist attacks on Democratic Governor Ralph Northam and the sexual assaults allegedly perpetrated by Democratic Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, the Republicans are likely to take over the governorship and resume control of Virginia’s entire state government. What’s more, the phrase “Virginia Democrat” is becoming a national laugh line and the prestige of the Democratic Party in Virginia has suffered a blow from which it will probably take a decade or more to recover.

Just How Bad Is Blackface, Anyway?

One of the key elements of the Left-wing McCarthyist attack on Ralph Northam is an hysterical, ahistorical condemnation of the whole idea of blackface. Northam’s critics are speaking and acting as if Northam actually joined the Ku Klux Klan or led a lynch mob. To understand what blackface really means you have to look at it in historical context. It was part of a wide variety of ethnic stereotypes comedians and entertainers in the U.S. trafficked in from the mid-19^th to the mid-20^th centuries. Look at the products of classic Hollywood and you will see comedians who specialized in playing stereotyped Germans, stereotyped Swedes, stereotyped Irishmen, stereotyped Jews and stereotyped Blacks.

The Marx Brothers began their careers playing ethnic stereotypes: Groucho was the “comic Jew,” Chico the “comic Italian” and Harpo, until he gradually got fewer and fewer lines of dialogue until he stopped speaking on stage at all, was “Patsy Brannigan,” the “comic Irishman.” Since the Marx Brothers actually were Jewish, modern audiences watching their movies tend to regard Groucho as the most “authentic” of them — but the people who went to their vaudeville appearances, their Broadway musicals and the initial releases of their movies saw Groucho as just another ethnic comedian playing a Jew.

There’s evidence that at least some blackface performers regarded their work as a genuine, heartfelt tribute to authentic Black music and culture. One of the most interesting documents of this is the 1934 film Wonder Bar, in which Al Jolson — whose star power and status as the first person who played the lead in a successful sound film kept blackface and the minstrel-show tradition it sprang out of going for about two generations after it would have otherwise died out — has two large production numbers.

On his whiteface number, “Vive la France” (the film is set in Paris and casts Jolson as an American entertainer who owns a nightclub there), Jolson sings in a high, rather whiny tenor with a fast, irritating vibrato. On his blackface number, “Going to Heaven on a Mule,” he drops his register, sings from the chest instead of the throat, slows his vibrato and achieves a sound surprisingly like that of the genuinely African-American concert singers and Broadway performers of the time. The number itself, directed by Busby Berkeley, is a conglomeration of just about every racist stereotype you can imagine (which probably kept this film from being revived in the early 1970’s with Berkeley’s other major films), but Jolson’s sincerity and soul transcend the minstrelsy conventions and are genuinely moving.

But McCarthyism of both the Right and the Left has a total disregard for historical context. If we consider it wrong today, it must always have been wrong. In a recent Los Angeles Times article on the problems various potential Democratic Presidential candidates are having with the “#MeToo” movement (https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-me-too-presidential-campaign-20190210-story.html), Nan Whaley, mayor of Dayton, Ohio and a long-standing Democratic Party activist, is quoted as saying, “I think what has been acceptable in the past is not going to be acceptable in this cycle. And you’re seeing that bear out.”

Another characteristic of both Right-wing and Left-wing McCarthyism is its reluctance to consider a person’s total historical record. To a McCarthyite, on either end of the ideological spectrum, you are the worst thing you ever did — forever. Local Democratic party organizations throughout the U.S. used to hold major fundraisers on what was called “Jefferson-Jackson Day.” No more: the two founders of the modern-day Democratic Party have both been ruled out of its pantheon, Thomas Jefferson because he was a slaveowner and Andrew Jackson because he not only was a slaveowner but pursued a genocidal policy against Native Americans.

The fact that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, with its flat-out statement that “all men are created equal” and are entitled to the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” has been flushed down an Orwellian “memory hole” by the Left’s modern-day McCarthyites. More sophisticated historians might look at Jefferson’s ownership of slaves and participation in the plantation system that exploited them as signs of his human complexity and his inability, all too typical of our species, to live up to his noblest ideals in his personal life.

They might also look at the positive aspects of Jackson’s record, including his fierce opposition to secession (Donald Trump made an arguable case when he said that if Jackson had been around in the 1850’s there might not have been a civil war) and his attack on the Bank of the United States, a leftover from Alexander Hamilton’s desire to put Northern financiers in charge of the American economy forever. (The Bank of the United States got effectively revived in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve, which subcontracted America’s monetary policy to the financial elites who make it up.) But they don’t because to a McCarthyite, Right or Left, you are the worst thing you’ve ever done and nothing else matters.

Yet another problem with Left-wing McCarthyism, even more than the Right-wing variety, is a bizarre lack of concern with the aftermath of bringing down elected Democrats and allowing Republicans to take power. Do the people who are working so hard to drive Ralph Northam out of office really think that the cause of African-Americans in Virginia will be better off if Republican Kirk Cox becomes the state’s governor? Or, more likely, do they care?

San Diegans have an object lesson in what happens when Democrats gang up on a Democratic politician and force him out of office so he can be replaced by a Republican. In 2013 newly elected Mayor Bob Filner, the first Democrat to be Mayor of San Diego in 20 years, was brought down by a coalition of Democratic activists concerned about his lewd and salacious comments towards women in his office. They eventually got rid of Filner and forced a special election to replace him — which was won easily by moderate Republican Kevin Faulconer.

Had the parties been reversed — had Filner been San Diego’s first Republican Mayor in 20 years — the Republicans would have rallied around him as they did nationally around Brett Kavanaugh (and Clarence Thomas before him), and he’d probably still be in office. But Filner had the bad luck to be a Democrat, a member of the party crucially dependent on the votes of women and people of color to make up for their ongoing disadvantage among white men, and therefore he had to be sacrificed — as did U.S. Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota), New York governors Elliot Spitzer and Eric Schneiderman, and other politicians who have, justly or unjustly, run afoul of the Democrats’ sex police.

At least Filner was held to account in 2013 for things he actually did in 2013. Ralph Northam is the victim of a concerted campaign by fellow Democrats to push him out of office over things he did 35 years ago. But that’s yet another aspect of both Right-wing and Left-wing McCarthyism: not only are you the worst thing you’ve ever done, you’re the worst thing you’ve ever done no matter how long ago it was or how much you’ve changed since. The folks leading the charge against Northam are utterly uninterested in how he’s grown or changed, or whether the ambiguous photo in that medical-school yearbook (even if he’s in it we don’t know whether he’s the figure in blackface or the figure in the Klan hood) reflects how he feels about racial issues now.

In 2017 Northam was forthright in his denunciation of the racist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and said that white supremacy had no place in his home state. That was a highly gutsy move for a candidate who was running as a moderate and hoping to peel off some crossover Republican votes in his campaign. It was also just two years ago. Reason and good sense would suggest that the Northam of 2017, the one who denounced the violent white supremacists in Charlottesville, is more likely to be the Northam of today than the Northam of 1984 who blacked himself up for a Michael Jackson impersonation contest and put a stupidly insensitive, racist photo on his college yearbook page.

But McCarthyism, on either side of the ideological aisle, has nothing to do with reason. The Right-wing McCarthyites, including McCarthy himself and the members of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, didn’t just ask people if they were Communists. They said, “Are you now or have you ever been … .” What’s more, they didn’t just ask people if they were or ever had been Communists, they asked them about a whole variety of progressive and liberal organizations and movements because their real intent was to destroy America’s progressive and liberal political ideologies by associating them with our Cold War enemy, Communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular.

No Compassion, No Redemption

Indeed, one crucial difference between Right-wing and Left-wing McCarthyism actually makes Left-wing McCarthyism look worse. Right-wing McCarthyites, perhaps influenced by the Christian religious doctrine of sin and redemption, at least offered its victims a way out. Just as Jesus Christ told the woman taken in adultery, after he saved her from being stoned by the mob, “Go and sin no more,” Right-wing McCarthyites offered an elaborate ritual for its victims to escape its clutches and go on about their careers.

The ritual was humiliating. It involved not only accepting a public shaming but feeding the McCarthyites more victims by “naming names,” denouncing your friends and others who’d been in those dreaded liberal, progressive or Communist movements with you. Victims of the Hollywood blacklist had to appear before a number of highly placed figures in the Right-wing movement — newspaper columnists Sidney Skolsky and Westbrook Pegler, actor John Wayne, director Cecil B. DeMille, labor leader Roy Brewer (who as head of the motion picture projectionists’ union was the key figure who enforced the blacklist by ordering his members to refuse to show any film made with blacklisted talent) — and grovel enough until these people were convinced of the sincerity of their repentance.

The victims also had to give up any involvement in liberal politics, no matter how innocuous they would have seemed by today’s standards. If they pledged to donate in the future only to health charities and other innocuous causes, that was one step on the road to redemption. If they flipped their political views 180° and re-invented themselves as born-again Right-wingers, that was even better. The process of political rehabilitation for a blacklisted actor, writer, director, educator, businessman or clergy member was arduous and humiliating, but at least it existed.

The Left-wing McCarthyites of today offer no such process of rehabilitation. To them, there is no sin and redemption — there is only sin. People who have offended against today’s codes of conduct, no matter how far back it happened, are to be shamed, anathematized and driven from public life forever. When Kevin Spacey was revealed to have made unwanted sexual advances to aspiring males (one good thing the #MeToo movement has done is expose that the casting couch victimizes men as well as women), he was cut out of an already completed film, The Richest Man in the World, and replaced with another actor.

Movie stars and production officials who have attempted comebacks after falling from grace due to allegations of sexual harassment and assault have been ridiculed back onto the sidelines. They have also been the subject of calls from progressive organizations for the banning of their work. I have been sent e-mails asking me to sign petitions urging Spotify and other music streaming services to eliminate R. Kelly’s records from their playlists because of the allegations of child molestation against him. I’ve also been asked to sign a petition to the producers of the upcoming film Red Sonja to fire the film’s director, Bryan Singer, because he, like Spacey, has been accused of unwanted sexual advances towards young men trying to make it in the business.

I have refused to sign any such petitions because to me they are all too reminiscent of the tactics Right-wingers in the 1940’s and 1950’s used against progressive entertainers. If these people have committed actual crimes, they should be prosecuted. If their actions don’t rise to the level of prosecutable offenses but you disapprove of them on moral grounds, you can punish them by refusing to see Bryan Singer’s movies or buy (or stream) R. Kelly’s records. But I think it’s just as wrong for the Left to try to make certain people unemployable because of actions that now seem politically or socially unacceptable as it was for the Right to do that in the original McCarthy era.

Another tactic of both Right and Left McCarthyites is their utter lack of a sense of proportion. When the U.S. Senate was debating Al Franken’s fate, and his defenders were saying that all he had done to his alleged victims was put his arms around them and kiss them — whereas people like Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein were credibly accused of sexual assault and, in some cases, out and out rape — Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) made a statement that the mere act of saying there should be distinctions made between levels of sexual misconduct was itself sexist and reprehensible.

The Los Angeles Times article cited above about Democratic Presidential candidates’ struggles in the “#MeToo” era to deal with their pasts offers plenty of examples of Left-wing McCarthyism. One of the interviewees, Sarah Slaman, an activist in Texas who worked for Bernie Sanders’ campaign in 2016 but since turned against him because she felt he had been too dismissive of women’s complaints of sexual harassment from some of his male staffers, said that despite Sanders’ recent apologies “I don’t think that Sen. Sanders has changed much of his mindset.”

Another interviewee, National Organization for Women president Traci Van Pelt, said of former vice-president Joe Biden, “It’s hard for me to forgive him” for having chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 when it considered Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court and dismissed allegations of sexual harassment against him by his former staff member Anita Hill. Van Pelt was asked if Biden’s sponsorship and success in pushing the Violence Against Women Act through Congress in 1994 mitigated his record in the Thomas hearings. Her answer was basically no: “He’s done a lot of good with the Violence Against Women Act, there’s no question of that. But I just think maybe it’s time for new thinking.”

Another potential Democratic Presidential candidate, U.S. Senator Kamala Harris (D-California), is facing a scandal the Sacramento Bee broke last December over her former staff member Justin Wallace’s record of sexually harassing women in the workplace. Wallace’s assistant Danielle Hartley sued him and the state over Wallace’s alleged treatment of her. Harris publicly insisted that she didn’t know anything about Wallace’s actions until the Bee reported them: “It was a very painful experience to know that something can happen in one’s office — of almost 5,000 people, granted, but I didn’t know about it. That being said, I take full responsibility for anything that has happened in my office.”

It’s typical of the left-wing McCarthyite mind-set that Harris’s aggressive questioning of U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over the allegations of sexual assault against him in his confirmation hearings is not being treated by Democratic activists and the media as a sign that her mind has changed or that having harbored a sexual harasser in her own office might have increased her awareness on the issue. Instead, she’s being denounced as a hypocrite. A Sacramento Bee editorial called Harris’s denial “far-fetched” and added that if it’s true, she “isn’t a terribly good manager.”

Larry Gerston, a political scientist at San Jose State, was one of the people interviewed for the Los Angeles Times article. He said that Harris, like Sanders and Biden, are being judged by today’s standards for behavior that occurred years or even decades ago. “It’s very hard for those folks to go back and undo what they did at a time when it wasn’t viewed as terrible as it is now,” he said.

The history of the original McCarthyist period offers some lessons the Left should be learning right now. Liberal Congressmembers and Senators who offered “compromise” measures against politically repressive legislation being pushed by Right-wing McCarthyites often found their proposals didn’t replace the original bills but just got added to them, making them even more repressive. Much of American political history consists of the Left pioneering strategies and tactics that the Right then adopts and uses against them. No matter what the motives of the Left-wing McCarthyites, their attempts to shame fellow liberals and progressives as secretly racist, sexist or not aggressive enough in their defenses of women and people of color are likely to backfire. The shame game is one the Right is simply better at than the Left.

Besides, as American liberals, progressives and Leftists fight each other and have nasty public spats over who’s the “purest” of them all, it will be the Right who triumphs. It’s an odd quirk of modern American politics that Democrats seem more obsessed than Republicans with the personal qualities of those they nominate and attempt to elect, while the Republicans — supposedly the party of evangelical Christians and their “family values” — couldn’t care less. Republicans keep their eyes on the ideological prize, voting for people (including Donald Trump) who promise them results — especially appointing Right-wing judges who will end all this “dangerous liberal nonsense” about women, people of color, and Queer people having rights.

Democrats need to learn to be a little less principled and a little more practical. They have to start asking themselves, before they launch McCarthyite jihads against elected officials like Ralph Northam over 35-year-old yearbook photos, if the causes they believe in — particularly civil rights for people of color and protection of women against sexual harassment and assault — really will fare better if they drive flawed Democrats out of office and replace them with ideologically driven Right-wing Republicans.