Dionne ventures that "sound conservatives" such as Bob Dole, who would like to see their party "shut down for a while so it could 'spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas,'" are almost hopelessly outgunned by the power of "Bachmannism," which "substitutes accusations for ideas and paranoia for an agenda."
The Minnesota right-winger deserves to be memorialized with an "ism" because she perfected a tactic well-suited to the current media environment: continually toss out outlandish, baseless charges, and, eventually, some of them will enter the mainstream media.... Get just a handful of your accusations and strange takes on reality into the political bloodstream and you’ve won.
That is indeed how Bachmannism works in the current media environment. Yet Bachmannism, as McCarthyism, worked at least as well in an older, technologically primitive media environment, and of course rank demagoguery and shameless showboating have been around since democracy's seedlings of ancient Greece.
So what's the trigger? The media are simply the conduit, as Dionne rightly notes. But perhaps Bachmannism isn't so much substituting "accusations for ideas and paranoia for an agenda" as it is confirming its party's conceptual irrelevance--and the implications here are profound, for that renders the sound conservatism of Bob Dole & Co. as irrelevant as Michele Bachmannism.
Really, other than accusations and paranoia, what could contemporary Republicanism have to conservatively offer that Democrats haven't already structured as party doctrine? Go ahead, survey the topical field as played by Dems: deficit reduction--even at the worst possible time--check; an expansion of healthcare coverage and a bending of its cost-curve mostly through private means, check; an aggressive, backseat-to-no-man national security stance, check; the statutory permanence of virtually all of Bush's temporary tax cuts, check; on and on.
Republican conservatives can proffer no authentically conservative ideas because Democrats have already appropriated them. The Dems have squeezed Republicans into a kind of Madness by Necessity: When the other guys are already assiduously whacking deficits and terrorists, all you've got left are baseless charges, strange takes, and rather justified paranoia.