Who’s ready for more Blake Masters? The Wall Street Journal reports that the Peter Thiel acolyte and failed 2022 Senate candidate in Arizona is gearing up to run for Senate again in 2024, in what could be a three-way race between Independent incumbent Kyrsten Sinema, likely Democratic challenger Ruben Gallego, and a Republican.

Why? Masters’s candidacy was, I repeat, a failure. It was a remarkably repulsive mélange of Terminally Online messaging, off-putting aesthetics, and obsequious Trump toadying, undergirded by the candidate’s own severe charisma deficit. The Masters worldview appeared to draw from some ersatz and unholy combination of the ideas of Thiel, his boss and patron; Silicon Valley monarchist-LARPist Curtis Yarvin; now-deceased terrorist Ted Kaczynski (the “Unabomber”); Singaporean free-market autocrat Lee Kuan Yew; and the paleoconservative/racist thinker Sam Francis. His campaign was based on the belief that this weirdness made him distinct, and that, combined with a Trump endorsement and bizarre videos in which he would, for example, shoot guns (“made in Germany,” he took care to remind us) into an empty desert, it would power him to victory.

It did not. Masters, hubristically assured of his greatness, entertained the idea that he could have beaten Democrat Mark Kelly in 2020, which Martha McSally failed to do. He ultimately performed no better against Kelly than McSally did. But Masters did something worse than that. He was one of many bad Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms who lost winnable races. He fell to Kelly even though voters in the state preferred Republican control of the Senate. Masters was included in the post-2022 Republican “autopsy” (where is that, by the way?), I assume so that the forensic pathologists involved could have a case study. There is no other plausible justification.

So why is this failure running again? Maybe this time he believes he will have better talent around him than last. Regardless, he is proof of a phenomenon in modern politics I have complained about repeatedly: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” That is, the sordid state of politics today dissuades good people from running for office at the same time it attracts bad ones. The end result is to make everything worse.

There’s one potential upside to a Masters candidacy, however. I am no Leninist, but in this case, there might be some truth in believing, as Leninists did, “the worse the better.” A Masters campaign would inevitably clash in a Republican primary with one by failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who is also expected to run. Like Masters, Lake lost a winnable race. But she performed better than Masters did (as did every Republican running for a statewide office in Arizona last year). Obviously a more put-together state Republican Party — which Arizona’s is not — would not see either Masters or Lake running for anything. But Lake, a former news anchor, seriously outclasses Masters in charisma. This is a low bar, to be fair, also cleared by many cacti in the Arizona desert. But that matters in a primary, and early polling shows a Lake blowout against Masters. Those who want Trumpian politics would rather get it from Lake than from Masters.

For the worse truly to be the better, however, the primary between the two of them would have to be competitive, with some electable alternative running up the middle while letting them fight. If that happens, then the political deterioration we’ve seen, especially in Arizona, could eat itself. The superabundance of Trump-inspired candidates could prove self-defeating. And conservatives with an actual interest in governance instead of performative grievance and too-online posturing might have a foothold to take back this essential swing state. Mimesis can have its advantages. Maybe Blake Masters is just the scapegoat Arizona needs.