Repugs Don't Want to Govern; They Just Want to Rule

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

It's just another reminder that Republicans aren't really "conservative" anymore. These are radical economic libertarian ideologues as wild-eyed and unrealistic about human nature and economics as any Bolshevik. What they want is a society that has never existed before in modern history, testing an already-discredited economic theory that has never been pursued to its full extent because it's too demonstrably crazy, with social order enforced by a code of morality and institutional hierarchy most voters have already rejected.

That's why American politics is so impossible right now. These are not traditional disagreements over this program or that, or the size and scope of this effort or that one. Modern Republicans aren't conservatives so much as revolutionary revanchists, seeking to "take back their country" by creating a libertarian economic utopia such as has never existed (nor, due to its internal unworkability, will it ever exist) in the world. The left can point to other countries that work reasonably well along the lines we would prefer: we can point to Canada, Germany, Sweden and many other countries besides whose solutions to vexing American policy problems have worked out substantially well for them. Republicans cannot point to similar examples because they do not exist.

That can be an admirable thing if you're trying to found the world's first modern democracy. It's not so admirable if you're trying to found the world's first libertarian plutocracy. But either way, it's not conservative. And the left can't just come to "bipartisan agreement" with that sort of thing.