Politics & Power Quote by John Avlon

Avlon’s “wingnut” is less a label than a rhetorical trapdoor: it yanks political extremism out of the realm of ideology and drops it into temperament. By defining the term symmetrically - far-right and far-left - he positions himself in the moral center, a place that reads as reasonable not because it’s neutral, but because it’s framed as the only adulthood in the room. The word choice does heavy lifting. “Professional partisans” implies a paid ecosystem of outrage. “Unhinged activists” turns passion into pathology. “Paranoid conspiracy theorists” finishes the triad by making the threat not just loud but irrational, untethered from shared reality.

The subtext is a warning about incentives. These aren’t merely people with strong views; they’re operators and true believers whose power grows when society loses a common story. When Avlon says they “always try to divide rather than unite,” he’s arguing that polarization isn’t an accident of disagreement - it’s a strategy. The “always” matters: it paints wingnuttery as a consistent mode of engagement, not an occasional excess.

Contextually, Avlon’s career has sat in the post-9/11, post-Tea Party, post-Trump media environment where attention is currency and extremity outperforms nuance. Calling out both ends signals a bid to escape the partisan cage match, but it also risks a familiar centrism move: flattening asymmetries in power or harm by making the problem “the extremes” rather than specific actors. The line works because it offers readers an enemy who isn’t “the other side,” but the people who profit from turning every issue into civil war.