Everyone loves a political picket-line-crossing contrarian - when he is embarrassing the other party.

Thomas Massie’s primary loss in Kentucky on Tuesday was not a squeaker.

It wasn’t even remotely close. It was not a bad-weather, low-turnout, recount-watch kind of defeat. Trump-endorsed Ed Gallrein beat him by roughly ten points, about 55–45, in a Republican primary where Massie was the incumbent and the better-known candidate. That is wide enough to mean something significant. 

It was not merely a warning. It was a repudiation of his leadership style by the voters in his own party.

There is a temptation to turn every primary into a morality play. The brave independent loses to the machine. The party punishes dissent. The voters are told what to do.

But that is much too easy.

Political parties are teams. They always have been. They exist to win elections, advance priorities, reward allies, and punish people who make the job harder. That is not some new Trump-era development. Democrats do it. Republicans do it. Every organized political movement does it.

The real lesson of Massie’s defeat is that everyone loves a contrarian when he is crossing the other party’s picket line.

Republicans have become fond of John Fetterman because Fetterman is a Democrat willing to annoy Democrats. He is more conservative than much of his party on Israel, immigration, and questions of working with Republicans. He insists he is still a Democrat, but he has also bet his political identity on an independent streak that regularly infuriates his own side.

Of course Republicans like him. He confirms what Republicans already believe about the Democratic Party: that its activist class has moved too far left, that support for Israel should not be controversial, and that the southern border is not a right-wing hallucination.

Democrats have had a similar soft spot for Massie. Not because they agree with him on everything. But Massie was useful to them when he broke with Republicans on war powers, foreign aid, spending, surveillance, and other issues.

This is how politics works. A dissenter in the other party looks principled. A dissenter in your own party looks like a problem.

Democrats know this perfectly well because they have their own dissenters. John Fetterman is one kind: more conservative than the majority of elected Democrats on certain cultural and foreign-policy questions. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is another kind: more progressive than the majority of elected Democrats in Congress.

AOC did not arrive in Washington by politely waiting her turn. She beat Joe Crowley, a ten-term incumbent and chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, in one of the biggest Democratic primary upsets of the modern era. Then she withheld $250,000 in dues from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, objecting to its protection of incumbents from progressive challengers, and built her own fundraising apparatus to help candidates more aligned with her politics. She also clashed openly with Democratic leaders, including Nancy Pelosi.

Democrats celebrated AOC when she made Republicans uncomfortable. They were less thrilled when she threatened the internal order of the Democratic Party.

That is the line Massie crossed. He was not a liberal Republican. He was not a squish. He was a libertarian-minded, anti-spending, anti-interventionist conservative. But he became more valuable to the other side than many Republicans were willing to tolerate.

There is a place for dissent in a healthy party. There has to be. A party with no internal argument becomes stale, cowardly, and stupid. But there is also a limit. When an elected official repeatedly becomes the vote, the quote, or the procedural weapon used by the opposing party, primary voters are allowed to say: enough.

That is what Kentucky Republicans just said to Thomas Massie.

And they said it by ten points.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)