It’s hard to do justice to the weirdness of Roy Moore. It’s so pronounced that he couldn’t even pretend to be normal, not even for 30 minutes, not even long enough to stop scaring people who might be on the fence. Smooth fanatics mask their true aims, as Fidel Castro did with Communism, until they get what they want. Roy Moore couldn’t do that. A clever zealot would quietly ensure that all his jurisprudence flowed from his interpretations of Scripture and maneuver to appoint others on the bench who thought the same way. But Roy Moore never did subtlety, either.

How to understand his humiliating loss, a miracle of political malpractice that turned one of the nation’s reddest states, just barely, for one election, blue? If you’re Steve Bannon, you say that it was Mitch McConnell’s fault. If you’re Mitch McConnell, you say it was Steve Bannon’s fault. If you’re a Democrat, you say it was a referendum on Donald Trump. But at the end of the day, this was a man who people said had been banned from the Gadsden Mall. It was just too embarrassing.

Something about Roy Moore made it impossible to imagine him conceding, and I was fascinated to hear how he’d do it. But of course he didn’t. I should have known. Broadcasters had already left the RSA Activity Center, a venue down the street from the capitol building in downtown Montgomery, to record “the energy has really gone out of the room” reports. Scores of people were dwindling. Others were calling for prayers, but attendees knew it was over. And then Roy Moore behaved like Roy Moore, announcing that he wouldn’t concede at all.

It was a fitting denouement to an astonishing, and astonishingly strange, final 36 hours that saw Moore go from presumed victor to vanquished stooge. The final rally of his Senate campaign had made clear how far from compromise—with anything—Moore and his most die-hard supporters were. It took place in Midland City, population 2,366, a suburb of Dothan, population 68,468, at a cedar barn with chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. People parked in a makeshift parking lot on a field, guided by organizers waving flashlights, and at 5:30 p.m., half an hour before showtime, journalists still outnumbered rally-goers, each of whom, it seemed, was being stopped for an interview. “If he was guilty, he certainly straightened out!” said one man who walked off as a reporter ran after him yelling, “Your name, sir? Your name?” Another, who had created a Roy Moore hat by pasting a bumper sticker around the band of his fedora, was saying, “Trump has got the D.C. crowd worried about their money,” as two reporters diligently took notes. Outside the barn were Roy Moore signs and “Drain the Swamp” posters written in creature-feature font over a marshy background.

Faith and Loathing in Alabama: Inside Roy Moore’s Wild Last Stand



1 / 22 Chevron Chevron Photograph by Justin Bishop.

For weeks, journalists had been descending upon Alabama from all over the globe rather like Captain Kirk visiting Neptune—bewildered by how an alleged pedophile could triumph over a mere Democrat, as if the latter were a greater sin than the former. (Moore, who has been accused by multiple women of pursuing inappropriate sexual relationships with them in their teens, has denied any wrongdoing.) The unspoken fear at the heart of the Alabama story was that it would offer yet another piece of evidence that, in our cultural civil war, only the uniform matters, and only guerrilla methods settle things. Neither Moore nor Doug Jones, his Democratic challenger, seemed to know which side would win out. Nor did Trump. Divided as we may be, we were all sorting this out together in real time, on terrain that many in the media are only now mapping in earnest.