Bread and Circuses in Modern Rome

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Why did Olympia Snowe suddenly decide to quit the Senate? Jonathan Weisman provides this take:

Georgia Chomas, a cousin of the senator who described herself as more like a sister, said social conservatives and Tea Party activists in Maine were hounding her at home, while party leaders in Washington had her hemmed in and steered the legislative agenda away from the matters she cared about. 

“There was a constant, constant struggle to accommodate everyone, and a lot of pressure on her from the extreme right,” Ms. Chomas said from her real estate office in Auburn, Me. “And she just can’t go there.”

It’s easy to say that this is suicidal behavior on the part of tea partiers. They’ve hounded out a senator who’s more moderate than they’d like, but her replacement is highly likely to be a Democrat, which just makes things even worse from their point of view.

But it’s not just tea partiers. The left base of the Democratic Party is up in arms over the reemergence of Bob Kerrey in Nebraska, and the story there is pretty much the same. Sure, he’s infuriating, but if he doesn’t run a Republican is almost sure to win the seat. No matter what kind of lefty politics you have, it’s hard to see how that’s an improvement.

Back in the day — by which I mean five or six years ago — you had guys like Karl Rove defending RINOs like Lincoln Chafee because he knew that Republicans were lucky to have anyone on their side from a blue state like Rhode Island. Further back, William F. Buckley famously urged conservatives to support “the most conservative candidate who is electable.” Political pros still think this way, I assume, but they’re being overwhelmed by the party bases. This cost Republicans pretty dearly in the 2010 Senate race, where they lost at least three winnable seats because they nominated unelectable crackpots.

I dunno. Maybe we’ve reached a point where we’re all so bored and so fundamentally satisfied with things that we don’t really care all that much about winning anymore. What we want out of politics is entertainment, and insisting on gladiator-like duels to the death, egged on by howling mobs, is pretty entertaining. It all beats me.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate