THE PORTENTS IN PLAIN SIGHT.

I'm catching up with my reading, summer poolside being a good time to work through a lot of the stuff that accumulated over thirty-five years in the academic trenches, and came across this Michael Moynihan filing in Reason about the strange 2009 special election in Massachusetts.

For [Scott] Brown to lose by 15 points would have, in December, been considered a respectable result. To win was inconceivable.

Everywhere I turned I found r-dropping Bostonians complaining about government, insisting that Americans need to “take their country back.” One woman, who seemed overly familiar with all of my childhood neighbors—the Flynns, the McBreens—compared herself to a passenger on Flight 93 who wants to yell “let’s roll” and regain control of our hijacked nation. Or perhaps she was suggesting that President Obama is a Muslim. It was, like many of the arguments I heard, not completely clear. But the anger was palpable.

Those dismissing the foot soldiers who came out in the bitter and wet cold to hoot and holler for Scott Brown as both “teabaggers” and carpetbaggers are engaged in wishful thinking. I came across a man from Michigan selling “second American revolution” flags; an Atlanta native who, veins popping on his neck, told me that the government was run by “thieves”; a woman from Pittsburgh who “blogs on Facebook” (whatever that means); and a handful of people from New Hampshire who, according to their license plates, would rather die than not live free. But most of the Brown backers I met were like Nick Redmond, a native of Dorchester—the neighborhood famous outside Massachusetts for bequeathing New Kids on the Block and Donna Summer to American culture—who was voting for Scott Brown because, under the current administration, “the middle class is getting screwed.” Or John Camuso, a gay man from Boston who said he was “proud to give [Brown] my vote,” despite thinking that [losing Democrat Martha, the heir presumptive to Ted Kennedy] Coakley, whom he knew from his neighborhood, was a “nice lady.”

You read that right, Flight 93 was an inchoate meme long before Donald Trump descended that escalator.  As, apparently, were harridans thinking deplorable-shaming was a winning strategy.

And they were also in no mood for dialogue. As I walked toward the front lines, looking to take the temperature of Coakley’s shrinking base, a small woman in a North Face jacket and New Balance sneakers—the middle-aged Cambridge liberal uniform—shouted at me.

We have been here since this morning,” she said. “Go stand somewhere else.” They were waiting to catch a glimpse of the Obama motorcade.

True believers, these were, but they were more about resisting Scott Brown than adoring Martha Coakley.

“You want a quote?” someone yelled. I made eye contact with a flame-haired, sign-toting Coakleyite. He looked like an extra from Gangs of New York or a prize fighter from 19th-century Sligo. “Here’s your quote: Scott Brown sucks.”

And there you have it. As one Massachusetts libertarian said to me, no one was voting for Martha Coakley. They were voting against Scott Brown.

So what was wrong with her opponent? Brown, as voters were constantly reminded by Coakley’s campaign ads, is a Republican — a foreign virus in the Massachusetts body politic — and his talk of tax cuts echoed rhetoric employed by those mad Tea Party rubes. When he wasn’t conspiring with the knuckle-draggers, Brown was spending time at one of his “five properties,” which include an Aruba timeshare valued between $10,000 and $20,000. It was more than a little bizarre to accuse Brown of being too rich, too bourgeois, to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.

Yes, and "Not Coakley" isn't quite the same thing as Conservative Populist, as Mr Moynihan notes and as subsequent events confirmed.

While Brown is a semi-moderate Republican and almost all of his local supporters with whom I spoke were well-informed, engaged, and genuinely concerned about spiraling deficits and the unknown unknowns of ObamaCare, the out-of-state activists who came to Massachusetts would, in most any other time in recent American history, likely denounce the candidate as a namby-pamby RINO (Republican In Name Only) sell-out. Scott Brown is not a “teabagger,” as Rep. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and MSNBC sputterer Keith Olbermann maintain. Nor is he anyone’s idea of a social conservative, identifying himself as pro-choice and telling the Boston Herald that gay marriage in Massachusetts is “settled law.” But he isn’t a small-government Liberty Caucus Republican either.

In trying to stop Obama’s muddled health care bill by destroying Martha Coakley—a feat, incidentally, that she performed without outside help—conservative activists, bloggers, and Brown fan boys are going to soon have to deal with a guy who is not all that right-wing. And if Brown attempts to assuage the fears of the conservative Republicans who assisted his campaign by diving to the right on social issues, when he comes up for re-election in two years, the people of Massachusetts could very well punish him for selling out.

New Hampshire might have been another matter, as Scott Brown now represents New Hampshire after having been ousted by Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts.

There is, however, another portent, if you would only look.

What was the Kronstadt moment for my fellow Bay Staters?

Two things: a monstrous health care bill (and the swelling government it would precipitate) and a Democratic candidate almost Dukakis-like in her incompetence on the campaign trail.

Brian McGrory, a columnist at the Coakley-friendly Boston Globe, accused the candidate of being a “diva” who dodged debates and skipped the customary meet-and-greets. When asked by the Globe why she wasn’t out stumping like Brown, if she wasn’t being “too passive” in her campaigning, she fired back: “As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?”

When she was a rising star in the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office, the Globe admitted in an otherwise obsequious profile that Coakley was “Relentless. Icy. Unflappable. Never nice.” It was an assessment many Massachusetts voters would endorse.

Likable enough, I suppose.

But the Democrats' post-mortems turned to channeling their Pauline Kael (and hitting the chardonnay?)

If Democrats wish to avoid repeating Martha Coakley’s disastrous performance, if they wish to prevent a midterm election fiasco later this year, they would be well-advised to stop diagnosing dissenting voters with an acute case of false consciousness and start realizing that even reliably blue states can no longer be counted on to support an ever-expanding federal government. But in Boston’s liberal enclaves, among Obama’s true believers, there is little sign this realization will hit anytime soon. Pouring me a coffee, the barista at a Harvard Square coffee shop tells a coworker, “If there are Scott Brown voters in this state, I’ve never met them.”

History rhymes.