George Will had an interesting column, the other day, decrying Senate Democrats’ extremism in opposition to the First Amendment:

Forty-eight members of the Democratic caucus attempted to do something never previously done: Amend the Bill of Rights. They tried to radically shrink First Amendment protection of political speech. They evidently think extremism in defense of the political class’s convenience is no vice.

They’ve been a curious bunch, the current collection of Democrats in the Senate.  Moderation does not seem to be their thing.  When Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) gutted the Senate’s long-standing filibuster rules, it struck me as the kind of thing a politician does only when he thinks he’s go no reason to fear losing power.

J. Christian Adams may have found the explanation for this odd behavior:

No longer are Democrats anchored to the preferences of Americans in the middle. Bill Clinton’s triangulation is as obsolete as color film and bag phones. Obama has pushed policies far outside the mainstream, and even far outside popular will, but succeeded in wringing out an Electoral College majority in 2012 because of Catalist.

What Catalist does is to aggregate all available information about everybody in the United States and allow progressives to target their immoderate base to maximize turnout.  Adams notes that, if you can reach them, the fringes are less expensive to motivate than the folks in the middle.

Thus, the president who promised a new political harmony and allowed credulous voters to think he was a centrist uses divisive rhetoric at every opportunity and pushes radical policies on party-line votes, and the Senate majority leader takes to the floor of the people’s legislature to attack a pair of wealthy donors on the other side.  We get “war on women” nonsense, and we get climate change hysteria.

We get, ultimately, a very unhealthy political environment that will never function except to reach the objectives of extremists.

And it’s difficult not to wonder how much data from government agencies, like the IRS and NSA, has made its way into Catalyst… at least some top-secret version operated by only the most partisan radicals in their dark back rooms.