On Monday’s The Last Word, one would think that Nixon biographer and voracious student of presidential history Elizabeth Drew would be able to speak specifically about the political landscape when asked to tie the (tired) Trump-Watergate knot on MSNBC, and avoid trite partisan talking points. Nevertheless, she persisted:

Well, the Republican party today is very different from that (Nixon’s) Republican party as you well know, Lawrence. That was a much more just right of center party. And you have a lot of Republican moderates. I don't know if you remember Republican moderates, but they are very hard to find these days. And so this party, this Republican party is much further to the right than that party was. This party is much more concerned about what Rush Limbaugh or Breitbart or these various groups are going to do or say about them. They have Koch money. It's just a very different Republican party than then, which makes the question of impeachment, you know, the issue very questionable. But whether it's impeachment or something else, I have always thought that when Trump gets to be just too expensive for this Republican party that he threatens to take them down with him, they will find some way to act against him.

The default position of the Left, as a general matter, is that any arrangement that is politically disadvantageous to Democrats is the fault of some unknowable combination of conservative talk radio and the Koch brothers. The Left has blamed the Koch brothers for virtually every situation for which they would have to otherwise provide a coherent refutation, like the decision to pull out of the Paris accord or even the mere desire for a constitutional convention.

Drew is correct in one respect: the Republican party has moved right since the mid 1970s. Her hyperbolic apoplexy on that fact is hardly without company. But to whom should we look for these so-called “moderates” she longs for? Certainly not in the Democratic party, which has undergone its own transformation, from the party of slavery, the Klu Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and Bull Connor into one that is increasingly unwilling to entertain anything other than their own progressive orthodoxy, where there’s no such thing as gender, yet women, who by logical deduction don’t exist, are still oppressed.

While quickly becoming the party of Bernie Sanders rather than Jim Webb, the Democratic Party is hardly a safe-haven for centrism. But it’s those unprincipled Republicans who are to blame for our nation’s polarity, because of Rush Limbaugh. Or something.