DragonI

Luther Strange would have won in a landslide... Just too much crazy in nerve racking times. There IS a limit! pic.twitter.com/vketz7G1OR

— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) December 13, 2017

Drudge has previously labeled Moore “Judge Whore” on his influential news-aggregation website after reports of sexual misconduct allegations against Moore were reported.

Opinion | Want to Know What Divides This Country? Come to Alabama

It’s a state proud of how far it’s come, and yet it picked Roy Moore as a Senate nominee.

www.nytimes.com|Diane McWhorter

Peggy, née Wallace, braced for a new round of interviews, having often been asked during the presidential campaign to compare Donald Trump with her father, the segregationist governor George C. Wallace. “But my daddy was qualified” for office, she would say, long since a supporter of Barack Obama.

The Republican Party has long preyed on the shame of dispossessed white voters. But that shame — over “being viewed as second-class citizens,” Mr. Kennedy said — has converted into a defiance that the party doesn’t yet seem to grasp.

“Populism” has become a convenient shorthand for the nihilistic backlash, and the term has come to invoke a collection of largely irrational cultural tropes. But this doesn’t do justice to the critique of capitalism at the heart of the insurgency.

The power of racial shame ensured that this thwarted biracial uprising would be a fluke of history. When the white have-nots revolted in successive decades, they appropriated the elite’s racist shibboleths — and took them so much further than the haves ever intended.

The axiom of unintended consequences is the same today, and explains why populism remains ideologically incoherent: Caught up in feel-good spasms of nativism, the base is willing to overlook the Trump administration’s elite, kleptocratic culture.

And the tax-cut-hungry Republican establishment keeps sowing the whirlwind, under the assumption that, in Mr. Kennedy’s words, its base “would rather be poor than not be proud.” Though the party — and Mr. Trump — backed Mr. Moore’s button-down runoff opponent, Luther Strange, it has shown no hesitation in pivoting to the winner.

Donald Trump has upended the reconciliation script, recasting white nationalists as the victims — of an elite that includes an Ayn Rand-reading Republican House speaker as well as an arugula-eating black Democrat.

I'm a fellow Alabamian, Ms. McWhorter, and I beg to differ. White supremacy was not a "creation" of post-Confederacy elites to defeat populism; it is in our state's DNA.

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Alabama a bellwether? I wish. But the tide of state history remains all white.

-  Steel Magnolia Atlanta, GA