There's a saying: It's impossible to win an argument with an ignorant man. Given the year that this has become — and given the strange period we are living through — it is time to attach a corollary to that: But that doesn't mean that we ought to capitulate to ignorance.

Which calls to mind Nicholas Lemann's book report on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in this week's New Yorker. First, it must be said that Lemann is an esteemed figure, a longtime writer and editor for Texas Monthly and the Atlantic and now for The New Yorker, and, as the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, is the very soul of Ivory Tower journalistic probity.

It is, of course, Lemann's position and stature that make his failure to commit journalism in his piece on the pivotal Nevada Senate race all the more puzzling. No, it is worse than a puzzling failure: It is a capitulation to ignorance. Somehow this year, in our zeal to understand the madness around us, we have all gone a bit mad.

I'll explain.

In Lemann's piece — which finds Reid at the center of the great and angry storm sweeping across the country — his brand of journalistic probity apparently requires a journalist to give equal weight to both sides of an argument, however unhinged those sides may be (and please, decorum insists that you be more polite than to point out derangement when it looks you in the face), and to ascribe rationality where rationality is nowhere in evidence.

Here I refer to Reid's dim opponent Sharron Angle, who in spite of having done us all the service months ago of announcing publicly that she is ignorant and paranoid and displeased at the very existence of government, and is objectively speaking a halfwit, may find herself, come January, made Senator Halfwit, junior senator from the great state of Nevada.

Now, there are a few trenchant points that Lemann makes. But this, on which he ends the piece, is not one of them:

"Now Nevadans are being presented with a great clash of social visions: help from Washington with Reid versus less of Washington with Angle. The stakes are real, not rhetorical. Reid's reelection campaign is about the role of government in the Unites States."

This is, to put it mildly, an instance of a journalist imposing order on something that simply has no order. Giving credence to something that simply does not deserve any such thing. Lemann is just being lazy here, and leaves out a mountain of evidence that supports the notion that Sharron Angle hasn't even a high-school civics class notion of how our federal system was designed to work. And that Angle seemingly has no knowledge whatsoever of the role that the American government played in making the United States a great and powerful nation. And that she and her ilk have espoused positions that, in saner times, would be self-evident as strange and even harshly un-American.

Sharron Angle has advocated "Second Amendment solutions" should the elections not go to the tea partiers' liking, adding darkly, "If we don't win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?" Sharron Angle has said that Social Security and other government programs have replaced God and so are in violation of the First Commandment. As a consequence, she has said that she wants to do away with Social Security. Sharron Angle has said that there ought not be a separation between church and state, and that furthermore, there is no Constitutional basis for one. Sharron Angle has said that the Department of Education is "unconstitutional." Sharron Angle believes that insurance companies shouldn't be required by law to pay for anything. Sharron Angle thinks that autism is a big-government conspiracy. Sharron Angle harbors the delusion that several American metropolitan areas are governed by Sharia Law. Sharron Angle doesn't believe that it is the role of a United States Senator to aggressively advocate for his or her state.

This senate race in Nevada shouldn't even be close, because Sharron Angle is a nut. And in the interest of absolute fairness, if she is not a nut, then she does a stunning impersonation.

And her "Second Amendment solutions" comment alone is such an affront to decent and law-abiding people everywhere that she should be hounded from the public sphere for good. (It is absolutely legitimate — no, it is essential — to note here that it was "Second Amendment solutions" that one of the greatest terrorists and mass murderers in American history, Timothy McVeigh, employed when things didn't go to his liking. And this is not to slight any number of other nutbags who think similarly.)

Lemann makes no mention of any of this.

He instead spends a sizeable feature in one the great magazines parsing Angle's essential complaint — exalting it, really — to try to divine what it says about the larger contours of the American polity. Why does he ignore her essential extremism in favor of marveling, blandly, that she has the ability to "say what she stands for quickly, with real passion but without seeming odd or threatening." Why, for that matter, have we all as journalists ignored the essential extremism of the movement from which she springs, in favor of mountains of Politico-style bullshit on the November horse race, and stupid mewling about who's up and who's down, who's in and who's out?

Why in hell aren't more of us instead asking: Is this right? Are the positions espoused and policies promised by the "Tea Party" movement and by its candidates coherent? Beneficial? Ruinous? Stark raving mad?

Instead, we have allowed Angle to blather away the finer points of her lunacy, meekly accepting her insulting nonsense that she was taken out of context (is there a proper context for threats of armed insurrection because you're a sore loser?), or her equally insulting diatribes against a press that she feels has it in for her. If only we were truly deserving of that complaint. Because the truth is, of course, that we don't have it in for her nearly enough.

In saner times, we would likely never have know Sharron Angle's name, because in America we have always valued excellence, and when it mattered most, we have generally (with notable exceptions) elevated meritorious individuals to jobs such as the one Sharron Angle is asking for. And in the marketplace of ideas, crazy people and their ideas typically sink like stones. But this year, it is those people who are calling the tune. And we all just dance and dance.

(Before I go any further, it must be said that I am a partisan on the subject of Harry Reid, having written a book with Senator Reid, a book from which Lemann drew heavily for his piece. I have no quarrel with Lemann's use of the book — far from it, I approve — but his description of it is peculiar: "Like the autobiographies of Reid's Republican colleague John McCain, it was meant to 'humanize' (as they say in politics) a top-ranking official who had a reputation for being hard to love." An obvious point: Inasmuch as any book ever written by or about anyone since the advent of moveable type was meant in some fashion to "humanize" someone, this is a correct statement. But Lemann deploys the word in quotes for some reason, expressing an incredulity that he has no basis for.)

I am sure that there are many fine Americans involved with or inclined toward the "Tea Party" and its utterly incoherent hodge-podge of yearnings. But I have been to Tea Party rallies — I was at a massive rally with the Tea Party Express in Searchlight, Nevada, the tiny desert town where Reid was born and where he still lives, back in March — and I have marveled at the stunning number of my fellow Americans who look as if they've walked too close to plutonium, and who delight in believing things that are demonstrably false, or at the very least things that are starkly contradictory to one another. They are outraged — outraged — at the growth and reach of the federal government and the explosion of the debt and deficit. And they are equally outraged — beyond outraged! — at the prospect of the services they demand and rely on being cut by Washington. (And that is but the central contradiction. Oh, but there are many, many more.) And of course, they operate in a fever dream in which the Constitution has been raped and all their freedoms are gone. Starting from the second that Barack Obama was sworn in. They cannot point to a single right or privilege or Constitutional provision that has been so attacked, but to say that is to be a stickler in today's journalism. And please, whatever you do, don't try to present evidence of the Tea Party's muttering incoherence, because that will make you just another Constitution-hating conspirator, and A-ha! Everything you say is exactly what somebody like you would say! And please, whatever you do, don't point out the embarrassing and bottomless ignorance of these people, because that will make you an elite (personally, I come from a long line of elite manual laborers in the very trendy, very elite agricultural/industrial backwater of Highlands, Texas). And before you know it, we're all down the rabbit hole.

Go to a Tea Party rally, any Tea Party rally. I dare you. At the rally in Searchlight (held there to heckle Senator Reid one hill over from his fairly modest house — with his brother's trailer parked in the front yard, tres elite — and just days after Landra Reid, Reid's wife of fifty years, was hurt terribly in a near-fatal car accident), I listened to dozens of speakers and spoke to perhaps three-dozen attendees. Of these dozens, only one — a nice, funny and loquacious gentleman from Havasu City, by way of New Jersey — had a coherent, adult understanding of the implications of what he was saying. He was a smart, seemingly successful recent retiree, who disavowed all the birther nonsense that played prominently at the rally as "bullshit," but who then went on to say that almost everything that our government had undertaken since the founding was beyond the government's constitutional purview. Everything — save for national defense.

No Social Security. No Medicare or Medicaid. No safety net whatsoever. No GI Bill. No rural electrification. No federal aid to education. No Interstate Highway System. No New Deal. No Great Society. No environmental laws. No worker protections. No federal anti-poverty efforts. Oh, and no Civil Rights Act. No Voting Rights Act. Presumably no prohibitions on child labor, because that interferes with the free market, and the Constitution makes no such protection for children, you know.

Basically, no twentieth century.

I respected the man's candor, and his coherence. (I met no one else that day who made such sense. Tea Partiers, in my close experience, are like drunks at the end of the evening. They make no sense, and you just want to get away from them.) And I thanked him for telling me the truth. It was Thomas Jefferson's America that he meant for us to be, he readily admitted. An agrarian paradise, world leader in nothing so much as illiteracy and disease and unfulfilled promise. A country that would have strangled its greatness in the cradle from sheer lack of imagination.

These people really believe that great countries build themselves.

And that's the thing: When you have no idea of your own history (are proudly ignorant of it, in fact), and have warped ideas compelled by your warped resentments, then you either are Sharron Angle or you are drawn to figures like Sharron Angle.

(And where were these patriots during the presidency of George W. Bush, as Bush spent like a drunk in a whorehouse and exploded the size and reach of government and actually — demonstrably — eroded our rights and invaded our privacy? They were asleep on their couches, outrage the farthest thing from their dreams. It must be asked: What is different, this presidency from the last? I'm completely stumped.)

But they've awakened to their scatter-shot rage and they are following their broken compasses all over the map, and they're going to change the world in little over a week. Just whatever you do, don't dare let the government get its grubby hands on their Medicare.

EARLIER: Warren on Angle's Insane Fundraising

STAY TUNED: All-Access Coverage of the Nevada Senate Race

PLUS: COMPLETE CAMPAIGN COVERAGE ON THE POLITICS BLOG >>



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