I came to age in a relatively quiet, orderly decade, the Sixties. I mean, of course, quiet, orderly compared to now. Back then, the anarchists, the ones who wanted to overthrow the Republic, were leftists (the SDS, Black Panthers, etc.).

You had your occasional violent protests, but you could go to class or Bible study without worrying about getting gunned down by some disaffected mama’s boy or redneck jihadist. No one really ever worried that these ‘60’s leftists could topple the Republic.

Nowadays, the anarchists are right-wingers whom the media call “conservatives,” and thanks to gerrymandering, forty or fifty of them have managed to get elected to Congress. Some of these fire-breathers make Abby Hoffman and Rennie Davis look like [archaic reference warning] Ward and June Cleaver.

If the “You, Lie!” Joe Wilsons don’t get their way, like, if they don’t succeed in defunding programs they despise like Planned Parenthood, they throw tantrums and do all they can to shut down the government, or, worse, have the nation default on its debt. It’s as if their vision of the world stops at the zigzagging borders of their benighted gerrymandered districts.

I repeat: the media refer to these ideological, emotion-driven anarchists as conservatives. Joe Wilson, who screamed “You Lie!” to the President of the United States in a State of the Union Address, is considered a conservative!

I sort of worry that Joe and his ilk, unlike Abby and Rennie, could conceivably topple the Republic, or at the very least, sabotage its economy. It appears that the Founding Father’s system doesn’t work nowadays, and a parliamentary system might be preferable. If an irrational minority can completely undermine a rational majority, we have big time, perhaps, insolvable problems, and because of gerrymandering, the chances of Freedom Caucus members being defeated in a general election are as unlikely as Miley Cyrus converting to Mormonism.

The members of the Freedom Caucus are not conservatives, but radicals, so could we please start calling them radicals.

That might be a tiny but meaningful first step.