One reads – and it’s true – that in Wisconsin gerrymandering has disproportionately favored WISGOP candidates.
It’s done more, it seems: gerrymandering has produced a decade’s worth of crackpot Republicans: Walker’s crony economics, Ryan’s trickle-down tax bill, Priebus’s sycophancy to Trump, Fitzgerald’s literal serenades for Trump, etc. Occasionally, these men spoke in libertarian language, but there has never been a true libertarian program with any of them. They presided over bigger, more autocratic government than that which they inherited.
When the WISGOP is unchecked, the unchecked run the WISGOP.
Perhaps Ron Johnson was never going to make sense, but he’s part of a state party that stopped making sense long ago. A more competitive two-party environment might have – at least – kept Johnson’s basest claims in check, might have restrained him from his lunatic conspiracy theories.
Not now, not here: in error and dishonesty, one has to look back over a half-century, to McCarthy, to find a worse Wisconsin member of the United States Senate.