Liberals and conservatives routinely call each other crazy. New York magazine blogger Jonathan Chait takes a slightly more evenhanded approach, noting in a Tuesday post that there are crazies on both sides, but also claiming that right-wing nuttiness is far more prevalent in the Republican party than left-wing nuttiness is among Democrats.
Chait’s peg was a comment from Paul Ryan that scientists haven’t determined whether human activity contributes to global warming. In response, Chait fulminated, “Ryan is a nut. His ideological fantasies prevent him from accepting even basic scientific facts…Ryan has spent his life imbibing the tenets of right-wing-movement thought, and he can apply the concepts he has learned to nearly any topic.”
From Chait’s post (emphasis added):
Climate scientists believe with a 95 percent level of certainty (the same level of certainty as their belief in the dangers of cigarette smoking) that human activity is contributing to climate change…Scientists may not have the answer to what policies are appropriate for responding to the fact that greenhouse-gas emissions cause changes to the environment, but they can tell us what happens when we release heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere.
This is another way of saying that Paul Ryan is a nut. His ideological fantasies prevent him from accepting even basic scientific facts. He is, to be sure, a lucid nut, rather than a raving nut who accosts passersby on street corners. Ryan has spent his life imbibing the tenets of right-wing-movement thought, and he can apply the concepts he has learned to nearly any topic. The long-standing existence of nuts in American politics is by no means a solely right-wing phenomenon. Robert Kennedy Jr. has a famous name and wears nice-looking suits and is a nut as well, who argues that vaccines cause autism.
So while nuttery can be found on the left and right, it is not a bipartisan problem at the national level. Kennedy has never risen above the level of “activist.” If the Democrats let Kennedy write their party-policy manifesto, or gave him a spot on their presidential ticket, it would be very, very alarming. But Ryan is in a party where this sort of thing barely even attracts attention.
