New Political Orientation Discovered

A team of exploratory taxonomists from the Center for American Political Studies is announcing the now official emergence of a brand new breed of political being.

Said team co-leader Dr. Benita Riley, “Chalk this breakthrough up to the dogged stick-to-it-iveness of our team. Over the last four plus years it would have been so easy to satisfy ourselves and our NIH grant monitor with the finding that the seemingly aberrational behavior of so many on the American left was simply a function of the kinds of human foibles that plague almost every political orientation we’ve ever discovered.

“But we just kept looking and looking and looking some more at the nagging data that kept trying to tell us that for all their quacking like the self-serving, power-corrupted ducks of a simply ridiculously hypocritical badling of flacks for a presidential ducker so to speak of his alleged Democratic principles, we were looking at some other animal entirely.

“And the numbers, refreshingly, weren’t lying to us. All the left’s embracing of once seemingly reviled stances and policies regarding financial and war crimes and countless violations of the US Constitution and the social contract is actually not a matter of a standard political bent being bent a little out of shape in the political winds of these particularly dishonorable times.

“What I’m thrilled to announce, in fact, is that we’ve identified a whole new genus of political creature, one driven by forces that are orders of magnitude more complicated than simple leader worship and self-seeking and valueslessness.

“Provisionally called the Bohr Party, after Niels Bohr, arguably the Father of Quantum Physics, its members, or partycles as they’re being called, exist in a highly fluid quantum state that interacts quite strangely with the political left-right spectrum.”

Said Dr. Riley’s partner Dr. Rich Tanaka, “All but thrumming with an oscillatory hyper ever-readiness for the collapse of the next wave function that determines their position and their spin, this new wave of partycles keeps flaunting right and left the left-right duality.

“We’ve even seen them pull off the nifty trick of inhabiting two positions at once. And they can stop one direction of spinning on a dime and get from zero to light speed in the opposite direction in literally no time.

“The behavior of the Ignatiuses and Egans and Harris-Perrys of the world, and the Jonathans Chait and Alter are explained quite elegantly by Quantum Field Theory. With the help of probability amplitudes and eigenvalues and Planck’s Law and the Heisenberg  and Schroedinger Equations, there’s no reason to scratch our heads anymore when these increasingly distant cousins of the liberal do something like flip-flop from one administration to the next on the issues of illegal idiotic war and indefinite detention and unchecked executive power, for instance, or when they keep oscillating with regard to common sense populist approaches to fixing the debt the super rich exploded.

“Thanks to the uncertainty principle, we of course can’t predict with 100% exactitude when these partycles are going to act like the Democrats they almost seem to be. But we can at least stop expecting them not to act like Republicans.”

Added Dr. Riley, “The quantum analogy, we’ll admit, isn’t perfect. In the world of physics we’re dealing with laws of probability and other constants that don’t get fudged on. In the political world, the probability that this Bohr Party will act like conservatives, however, seems to just keep rising.”

In related news, another team of exploratory political taxonomists is announcing that after sifting through 30 years of data, they believe they have confirmed the long predicted existence of the so-called Black-White Party on the conservative side of the constellation of political orientations.

Called the Black-White Party not because they see everything in black and white but because of their defining trait of automatically saying black every single time a liberal says white, this phylum of reactionary differs from its true conservative cousins in that it derives its unshakable sense of rightness not from rightness necessarily but from the knee-jerk inverseness of its positions relative to the left even when the left is right and/or right.