Thread by @RadioFreeTom

Such a tiresome response. Protip: "Crazies took over my party" does not mean "your party was always wrong about everything." Yes, we knew had a crazy fringe. Ours, for a lot of reasons (including monetizing the crazy) took control.
Spoiler: The left has a crazy fringe too. /1

https://twitter.com/dobozysaurus/status/1305174979361767424

Conservatism isn't crazy. It's a necessary part of a democracy, just as progressivism is. But when we work on what killed the GOP, progs looking over our shoulder and saying "Well, we told you in 1985" only serves to remind us why it's hard to talk to mindless progressives. /2

And trust me, when all this is over, we're all gonna have a talk about how the GOP managed, for a time, to become the dominant party - "the party of everyone else" - with the *help of progressives*. Dems did, and do, holistically stink at politics. It made it easy for us. /3

Today, the American left has plenty of kooks in it who - for now - have been thwarted in the attempt to capture the Democratic Party. Liberals might want to think more about the general question of how a major party falls to its fringe instead of retconning all of 1952-2016. /4

Think, too, about how crying wolf - also a form of paranoid politics - for 40 yrs didn't help progs sway people. You said "fascist" so often people tuned it out. Reagan, Bush 1/2, Dole, McCain, Romney - all demonized.

And then you ran HRC, against all logic and caution. /5

You warned us? Sure. And we warned you: Let the Clinton idea go. You had Bill for two terms. Don't resurrect the battles of the 90s. Yes, the GOP was spineless against Trump and it deserves to be flushed for that. But never think you didn't have a hand in all this. /6

And before you all talk about "30 years ago," it's important to remember how Dems ended up in this jam *forty* years ago. /7

It's easy for younger progressives to forget how much the US felt like a failed state at the end of the 1970s, as liberal ideas were exhausted, the USSR was in the ascent, and we were all told to just accept "decline" and "convergence" with the Soviet model. /8

As Mark Lilla - no conservative - wrote recently: “It is difficult to convey to anyone who wasn’t alive and politically aware at the time what a dreary place America seemed in the late 1970s, how lacking in direction and confidence." It was the peak of liberal dominance. /9

This was a result of the exhaustion of the 1960s and the curdling of noble crusades like civil rights into identity and racial spoils factionalism. Conservatives seized an opportunity. Yes, while dragging our crazies along with us. Perhaps we shouldn't have, but we did. /10

But this is a cautionary tale for Democrats: You're on the verge of saving the country. But you've got a nutball fringe coming right along with you. Don't think you're immune to our mistakes. /11

Apostate conservatives spend a lot of time thinking about how things went wrong. We don't always agree. We're working on it. But spare me the lectures about how we were always crazy. It's silly and tiresome. /12x