This issue of Jacobin is scheduled to go to bed shortly before the midterm election, so the present article will drift to sleep blissfully unaware of its outcome. But 2010 already seems certain to enter the annals alongside dates like 1938, 1946, 1978, 1994: all were years of midterm elections that brought miraculous regeneration for the hardy species known as the American Right.

We would do well to remember that history did not begin the day Rick Santelli heckled “the losers” on CNBC. On an August afternoon in 1938, twenty thousand Midwestern Republicans gathered in an Indiana cornfield in what the New York Times called a “carnival atmosphere” to eat fried chicken and corn on the cob amid fluttering red, white and blue bunting, and to listen to the worthies of the Party of Lincoln declaim for an “end to the New Deal trend toward dictatorship and return to the ‘American way’ of government,” for a “mighty fight to save the United States as we have known it for 150 years.” The “Cornfield Conference” of 1938 was the organizing brainchild of a millionaire Republican jukebox entrepreneur named Homer E. Capehart — an accomplished ranter on the topics of socialism and the welfare state, a portly, pink-cheeked man in suspenders, soon to be a senator. It was held in the trough of the “Roosevelt recession” of 1937–38 and three months later the Republicans, basking in such rhetoric, picked up eighty-one seats in the House and six in the Senate.

Does that sound familiar? This year, the New York Times tells us, eight candidates from the Tea Party have a “good or better” shot of winning Senate seats, among the thirty-seven seats at stake. This is a tsunami. If the whole Senate were up for election, at this rate we could look forward to twenty-two Tea Partiers in the upper chamber next year. What does it tell us about the state of American political life? The colorful outer fringes of the movement have spawned candidates of the Christine O’Donnell or Sharron Angle stripe: outlandish characters, catnip for MSNBC liberals, who give off that special aura of otherworldliness peculiar to American extremist politics. (On the Left, witness the 9/11 truthers, chemtrails watchers and assorted monetary cranks). Angle has voted against water fluoridation. She advocates “Second Amendment remedies” to government tyranny and warns of Dearborn, Michigan falling under the grip of Sharia law. Strangely, she also seems close to the Scientologists. Liberals hear such talk and, predictably, cry fascism, but they couldn’t be further from the mark. Listen to the ranting of the Angles and you won’t hear the slightest echo of torch-lit parades or of uniformed thugs with identical salutes. On the contrary, the rhetoric tells of long, lonely evenings of solitary study, the musty smell of the dog-eared tract, the flickering glow of the monitor, the hothouse brain. This politics feeds on isolation; it’s allergic to militant collective struggle. No one ranting about black helicopters and Project MKULTRA will ever organize a March on Rome.