If you blinked, you missed it, but there were actually two very interesting lessons to be learned from a brief flap on Thursday in which PolitiFact hired, then fired, former Democratic congressman Alan Grayson to be a "reader advocate." Twitter exploded with complaints, and PolitiFact backed down. They'll search for some other Democrat to pair with Republican David Jolly.
It seems that Grayson's extreme partisanship, failure to respect the truth, and other poor behavior _ including accusations of domestic violence and physically intimidating a reporter _ have made him a rare point of partisan (and media) consensus.
Lesson No. 1: There's nothing inherently conservative or Republican about radicalism, norm defiance, and other types of behavior that make Madisonian democracy difficult. I talk about Republican radicals quite often because there are a bunch of them in Congress who matter a lot, but that's an artifact of all sorts of things, not something for which liberals (or centrists, or people at any other point on an ideological scale) are somehow naturally immune.
Lesson No. 2: The impulses may not be particularly Republican, but the two parties are very, very different. Imagine, for a moment, that PolitiFact had hired, say, Montana Congressman Greg Gianforte, who "body slammed" a reporter during his election campaign last year, then fired him after journalists took to Twitter to complain. I obviously can't prove anything, but I strongly suspect that Fox News would broadcast wall-to-wall outrage over how the (supposedly) liberal PolitiFact had been intimidated by Democrats and the (supposedly) liberal media. Instead, as far as I can tell, few if any Democrats rallied to support Grayson.
I don't want to suggest Democrats are pure on this scale _ there's plenty of outrage-stoking on that side _ or that all Republicans are Ted Cruz and Louie Gohmert. Still, there really is an enormous gap between the parties, and one that matters quite a bit.
I worry quite a bit about whether Democrats are going to succumb to the kind of radicalism that has made the Republican Party increasingly dysfunctional over the last 30 or so years. It hasn't prevented them from winning their share of elections, but it's made governing very difficult for them. This has little to do with how liberal or how conservative the parties might be. It's about whether they're willing to abide by democratic norms, including a willingness to compromise when necessary. Far too many Republican politicians reject all of that.
So far, Democrats as a party haven't gone down that path, as can be seen from the Grayson example. Let's hope they don't _ and that Republicans can find a way to shove that impulse to the fringes, where it belongs.
