On Cranks And Consensus
Let’s thing of crankery as a dispositional attribute, a characterological feature of different people. Some are cranks by disposition, and some are non-cranks by disposition.
If you’re a non-crank and have basically any opinion about tax policy, you can find a comfortable non-cranky political home for yourself. There’s very little political consensus about this, so the “mainstream” encompasses a wide array of views and you can do what you want. By contrast, there’s a pretty tight consensus around foreign policy which means that if you want to have a “mainstream” foreign policy position you need to conform to the consensus. If you don’t want to conform to the consensus, then what you have to do is focus on some other kind of issue. Basically non-cranks either agree with the mainstream consensus or else in order to preserve their non-crank status go work on health care policy or education.
Consequently, dissent from the mainstream becomes the exclusive province of cranks. Not because the mainstream is pulling a trick and dismissing dissenters as cranks, but because it’s genuinely the case that only someone with a crank disposition would bother dedicating large quantities of time to marking himself as outside the mainstream.
