March of DEIms Syndrome

Chris Rufo proves it's not just left-wingers who become even more extreme, paranoid and hysterical when their side is winning.

A few months ago, City Journal posted an interesting piece by John Tierney about “March of Dimes Syndrome,” named for the polio charity which had to reinvent itself after the disease was nearly wiped out.

(Insert your own RFK, Jr. reference here.)

In the spring of 1979, a few weeks after the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, more than 65,000 people marched on the United States Capitol chanting “No Nukes, No Nukes.” As a young reporter at the Washington Star assigned to cover this new movement, I interviewed march organizers and noticed that all of them had previously organized protests against the Vietnam War. This struck me as curious: How had they suddenly become so passionate and knowledgeable about nuclear power?

I later learned that a term exists for this phenomenon—the March of Dimes syndrome—and that the tendency affects many other movements, too. Why, last year, did the Human Rights Campaign declare a “national state of emergency” for L…