The elevation of Marx is, in part, a story about the right-wing revolution eating its own. Two years ago, I wrote about the schisms among Colorado Republicans as MAGA forces took over the party, making the fanatically anti-gay Dave Williams party chair. When I first learned about Marx, I assumed he was part of the same faction as Williams, but I was wrong. Jimmy Sengenberger, a conservative columnist for The Denver Gazette, told me that much of Williams’s camp lined up behind Scott Bottoms, a hard-right state legislator who is, like Marx, a pastor, though one with a lower profile. “Those who are involved in the party, they really want to have control over the party,” said Sengenberger. But they seem to have lost it; in the primary, Bottoms came in third.
It’s easy for liberals like me to feel smug about this Republican fiasco. But the ridiculous rise of Victor Marx is the product of trends that, having transformed the Republican Party, are beginning to show up in Democratic primaries as well. When I asked Republicans how Marx had won, they described his charisma and social media reach, as well as voters’ contempt for professional politicians. “Victor Marx did a very good job of marketing himself as an outsider, as an answer to some of the angst Republicans have in Colorado,” said Chuck Broerman, a Republican official in El Paso County. “He has a great social media following,” Broerman added, and there was a bandwagon effect online. Marx, he said, “created a vehicle for people to focus their emotional energy.”
Speaking to Broerman, it was hard not to see at least faint parallels to emerging dynamics in parts of the Democratic Party. In Texas, the antisemitic sex therapist Maureen Galindo made it into a runoff for a congressional seat and, even after she proposed imprisoning Zionists, got more than a third of the vote. The New York socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier beat out the aging progressive Adriano Espaillat, and though not nearly as toxic as Galindo, other Democrats still had to answer for her outré positions, including her refusal to say that murderers should be imprisoned.
Schoening said some in Colorado are comparing Marx to Graham Platner. I would never go that far; Platner’s faults required digging, while Marx’s unfitness should have been evident from his public pronouncements. Still, Marx demonstrates what can happen when voters, feeling apocalyptic, disdain concerns about expertise and electability and let themselves be guided by their id. Many of us have welcomed the rise of a Democratic Tea Party, in no small part because the Tea Party was very effective at moving the country in its ideological direction. But once started, the process of voter radicalization isn’t easy to modulate.
