The Left-Wing Crack-Up

by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.  March 13, 2019

It was in the mid-1980s that I resuscitated the term “crack-up” and applied it to political movements that were not very healthy. I say I resuscitated the term because it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who first used it as a title for a 1945 collection of essays that were mostly personal and first published between the 1930s and 1940s. When he did finally crack up the term fell into disuse. Then I reviewed the state of the liberal coalition and the state of the conservative coalition and decided the term applied to both coalitions. I named one book The Liberal Crack-Up and the next The Conservative Crack-Up. Of the two books the liberal crack-up was most clearly observable.

The term has now been applied to politics off and on ever since, but in the last several weeks it has come into fashion with a vengeance. In the Spectator of London, in the Wall Street Journal, and in various other places crack-up keeps being resorted to in a political context. In the United Kingdom it pops up in relation to Brexit and the astonishing mishandling of Brexit by the government’s Theresa May and by Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn. In America it pops up in politics across the board but most frequently on the left in relation to the Democratic Party — and you who are reliant on the Leftist State Media (LSM) thought the Democrats were full of vigor. Guess again..........To Read More.....