The Left-Wing Crack-Up
by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.
March 13, 2019, 12:05 AM
by Brendan Kirby
Washington
It was in the mid-1980s that I resuscitated the term “crack-up†and applied it to political movements that were not very healthy. I say I resuscitated the term because it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who first used it as a title for a 1945 collection of essays that were mostly personal and first published between the 1930s and 1940s. When he did finally crack up the term fell into disuse. Then I reviewed the state of the liberal coalition and the state of the conservative coalition and decided the term applied to both coalitions. I named one book The Liberal Crack-Up and the next The Conservative Crack-Up. Of the two books the liberal crack-up was most clearly observable.
https://spectator.org/the-left-wing-crack-up/
