I remember a lady coming to inspect St. Mary's Home where I was brought up and seeing us all in our lovely Elizabethan uniforms we were so proud of, and bursting into tears all over us because it was wicked to dress us like charity children. We nearly crowned her we were so offended.

As the requirements of mass democracy forced the gentleman intellectual from the political scene, the new style political leaders felt the need to flatter the electorate by stressing the superiority of inborn, natural, intuitive and folkish wisdom and to devaluate the ratiocinations of the cultivated.

Righteous and dude were part of teenspeak at the time, and had already been immortalized by another clueless adult, Grace, the Wite-Out sniffing secretary (Edie McClurg) speaking of the hero in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Strikingly, we see that party births tend systematically to be at policy positions that are significantly more eccentric than those of surviving parties, whatever decision rule these parties use.