It's been noted many times that the conservative Republicans driving the shutdown/debt default crisis are insulated from political repercussions for their actions by the fact that they come from extremely conservative districts where they face little to no risk of getting beaten by a Democrat in a general election. The implicit argument is that safe seats equate to not just ideological extremism, but the kind of procedural extremism we're seeing now. Yet as Eric Boehlert observes, there are lots of Democrats who are just as safe as these Republicans—in fact, there are more Democrats with safe seats, and many of those seats are even safer than Republican safe seats. So why don't the extremely conservative* Democrats engage in the same kind of gamesmanship the Tea Party Republicans do, threatening to burn the whole place down unless they get their way?

Before we answer the "why" question, here's what we're talking about. Let's look at the Cook Partisan Voter Index, which sorts congressional districts by how much they lean to one party or another using presidential election results. There are 28 districts with a rating of R+20 or more, meaning the district votes 20 percentage points more for Republican presidential candidates than the nation as a whole does, and 69 districts at R+15 or more. On the Democratic side, there are 58 districts at D+20 or more, and 83 districts at D+15 or more. Almost none of the representatives from any of those districts has to worry about getting beaten by the other party, and nearly all of them are ideologically more to the edges of their party.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus lists 72 House members, and if they wanted to unite to make trouble, they certainly could. So why doesn't it happen? There are a few reasons. First of all, because they're liberals, they want government to do things, unlike Tea Partiers, who generally want government to stop doing things. This means that the threat of a government shutdown or a default is something they'd never employ, because they are sincerely distressed when the government stops doing what it does, while many Tea Partiers are unconcerned or even pleased when the government shuts down.

Furthermore, if you look at who those members are, another big difference emerges between them and the Tea Party. Many Tea Partiers are people who hadn't run for office before 2010, or maybe had served briefly in a state legislature where they were bomb-throwers, not legislators. They won their primaries by promising to be the most conservative, Obama-hating member of Congress the folks of their district had ever seen. In contrast, almost none of the safe Democratic members got elected just by saying that they were the most liberal candidate in their race. Most of them worked their way up through the lower political ranks, getting used to cutting deals, making compromises, and solving problems for constituents. They may be very liberal ideologically, but they're also old-school pols in many ways.

According to the Post, 101 Democrats occupy safe seats, compared to 67 Republicans. Yet the contrast of their behavior couldn't be more stark: Democrats have more safe seats in the House, yet it's Republicans who have embraced the agenda of "governmental sabotage," as New York's Jonathan Chait called it.

Fact: Lots and lots of Democrats have been winning very safe seats for a very long time. (It's not a new phenomenon.) But that doesn't mean Democrats used those easy wins as justification to push a wildly extremist agenda or to force the government to lurch from one crisis to the next.

For instance, most of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus come from very safe districts; equally safe as the ones that elected the Tea Party-friendly members of Congress who engineered the current shutdown. But have members of the Black Caucus banded together in recent years in an effort to bring the federal government to a halt because they disapproved of a previously passed law? Did they spend years, for instance, plotting to shutdown the federal government in order to protest the Iraq War, which they opposed? Did they conspire to provoke a series of crises designed to cripple the government and a Republican president?

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And yes, Democrats benefited from a huge number of safe seat wins while George W. Bush was president. Between 2002 and 2008, while a Republican was in the White House, Democrats held 42 of the 50 safest seats in the nation, according to an analysis done by Smart Politics.