'The forces that elected Barack Obama president, after all, were the same left-wing radicals whom we saw smashing windows in Seattle in 1999 and marching beneath the banners of Marxist organizations during the anti-Iraq War protests...'

That's Robert Stacy McCain, at his essay discussing one of Rand Paul's former aides, who used to be a neo-confederate, "Fight the Fight You’re Fighting":

Democrats have been so successful at “mainstreaming” left-wing fringe movements that we tend to forget these movements were ever on the fringe. Republicans, meanwhile, are so beholden to notions of bourgeois respectability that they often assist Democrats in denouncing and marginalizing the rightward fringe. This is how we find ourselves with a president whose bestselling memoir was quite probably ghost-written by the unapologetic terrorist Bill Ayers, and who was re-elected by a campaign that smeared the harmless moderate Mitt Romney as a dangerous menace to the common good.

So the Democrats not only never cede an inch of their radical past, but are forever pushing forward with new radicalisms, while Republicans habitually assume the strategic defensive. But should we blame this on the GOP, or blame it on the fringe? Jack Hunter, bless his heart, was trying to speak truth to kookery.

The conservative movement flourished in the wake of the 1964 Goldwater debacle not by purging their own fanatical supporters — some of whom were as kooky as any Paulbot — but by persuading these fanatics to get organized and comport themselves in a manner that could attract mainstream support. The movement that eventually elected Ronald Reagan president and, in doing so, subsequently defeated the Soviet empire, was very pragmatic in its approach to the electoral process and what we might call image management.

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