Acknowledging the admittedly remote risk that I am giving a hostage to fate by writing these words, I note that the implosion of Wendy Davis’s ugly and vacuous gubernatorial campaign in Texas has been a satisfying spectacle. On Tuesday, it is all but inevitable that Greg Abbot’s campaign and Texas voters are going to beat Wendy Davis like a circus monkey, and it will be her second significant defeat in the campaign: She ran triumphantly unopposed in the New York Times primary, with Robert Draper all but kissing the hem of her garment, but she took a beating in the Rio Grande primary, with her penniless nobody opponent outperforming her in critical border counties that had gone heavily for Barack Obama in the presidential elections.
Bipartisan lesson: If you are going to run a horsepucky media creation as a single-issue candidate, pick a single issue that doesn’t stack voters up against you four to one.
“Fanaticism” is not synonymous with “extremism.” Extremism, as Barry Goldwater famously declared, is not necessarily a vice. My colleague Charles C. W. Cooke holds extremist views — absolutist views, in fact — about free speech, the sainted Mother Teresa was nothing if not an extremist in her devotion, etc. Mother Teresa sometimes doubted her faith, but the true fanatic does not. He is, as The American Heritage Dictionary puts it, “possessed by an excessive zeal and uncritical attachment to a cause or position.” The fanatic does not necessarily even hold out-of-the-mainstream opinions: Robert Reich, the lawyer who sometimes plays an economist on television, brings his unique brand of cracked fanaticism to views that are so common as to be pedestrian. Fanaticism entails the identification of the self with the cause, and the fanatic lives in fear that someone, somewhere, might be wrong about the Fair Tax, gay marriage, or the carried-interest treatment of private-equity managers’ incomes. In the case of Wendy Davis, this is particularly perverse: Her life has been given meaning by the opposite of life.
Fanatics in fact often have the least interesting opinions: We’ve all met that WASPy, raised-on-the-ninth-hole Haverford School graduate who discovered the Palestinian cause at Smith and continued sermonizing sophomorically on the issue well past the end of sophomore year. I once had a student who fit that description almost precisely, and every third word out of her mouth was “Zionist” — “The Zionists did this,” “The Zionists did that,” “Would you please pass the salt if the Zionists will allow it?” Every topic of conversation, from the Social Gospel movement to the quality of the food in the Bryn Mawr College cafeteria (not bad), was in the end about the sundry crimes of the Zionists. I shared with her the Churchill witticism above, and she responded: “Exactly. It’s like when you’re debating with a Zionist . . . ”
