Park MacDougald, writing in Tablet, has captured something I thought must be at work but that I’ve had trouble describing. He calls it the “Democrats’ insanity defense.” What it is, is that some Democratic policy proposals are so far out of the mainstream that voters cannot accept a fair description of them, and instead think that the Republican informing them of it must be exaggerating, or lying, or a crazy person themselves.

Often the specific truth revealed—that the outgoing Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team in order to gather information for what later became the Russiagate hoax, to cite [an] example—is in fact “crazier” than Trump’s exaggerations or garbling of the details. The insanity of the policy becomes the front line of defense against potential blowback: Who would believe that anyone would actually propose or support something so obviously at odds with public opinion and basic common sense? Trump must be a raving nutjob, just like we told you he was.
The reason that this strategy has worked is because Democrats rely on all nonexplicitly right-wing media to adopt their framing of issues and cite the party’s preferred experts, which they do. The party’s influence over the country’s communications apparatus has, for the past decade, emerged into something like a political superpower, allowing it to act outside the normal bounds of American politics without suffering from political blowback.

Read the whole illuminating piece.