Repug Extremists Will Never Quit Because What They Want is Impossible

It's not even a "return" to some pre-penicillin conservative paradise. It's a wingnut fantasy that never existed: every American man a white, straight, christian, self-made millionaire entrepreneur; every American woman a white, straight, christian, beauty-queen-turned-homemaker who gives perfect blowjobs and never expects anything in return; non-stop wars all over the globe pitting our brown and black cannon fodder against their brown and black cannon fodder, just because.

Don't worry; they'll come out of this congressional "chaos" stronger, crazier and more determined than ever.

Kevin Drum:

Look at this from a conservative point of view. They want things to move in a conservative direction. But compromise doesn't do that. In practice, it always seems to move things in a more liberal direction, with a few conservative sops thrown in that eventually wither away and die. This leaves them with little choice except increasingly hard-nosed obstructionism: government shutdowns, debt ceiling fights, filibusters for everything, voter ID laws, etc. etc.

 

SNIP

It's in this sense that our system of governance really is at fault for our current gridlock. Not directly because of veto points or our presidential system or any of that, but because these features of our political system allow conservatives to live in a fantasy world. They dream of what they could do if only they had the political power to do it, and they really believe they'd do it all if they got the chance. Thanks to all those veto points, however, they never get the chance. Full control of the government would disabuse everyone very quickly of just how far they're really willing to go, but it never happens.

We are living through an era in which conservatives are living a fantasy that can never be. But our system of governance denies them the chance to test that fantasy. So it continues forever. It will stop eventually, either because conservatives somehow do gain total political power and are forced to face up to its limits, or because it burns itself out through continual head banging that gets them nowhere combined with demographic changes that decimate their base. Probably the latter. It's only a question of how long it takes.

 No.  It's a question of how much irreversible damage they cause before that point.