It turns out the Movement's rank and file are exactly the same wretched hive of scum and villainy that Liberals have been telling you about for decades -- and the Conservative Brain Caste knows it. Sure they dance around for awhile, but eventually Mickey Edwards gets to the point:

The Republican Party we have today could disappear and be replaced by a range of its little subsets, all these other -- a Christian right party, a libertarian party, a no government, no tax party, a gun owner's party, a no gays and no immigrants party, each one with its own small niche of true believers...
And that is the conversation we will never, ever have at the national level.

That is the reason that it doesn't matter how many tea leaves and goat entrails and academic papers David Brooks pores excitedly over to predict his Awesome Whig Tomorrow.

Because you can't make bricks without straw, and you can't make a political movement without people. And the plain, cold, ugly truth of the matter is that the Right is really nothing but the sum of its parts.

And its parts are grotesque.

And the reason we will never have that conversation is because, floating along at the ippy-tippy-top top of the movement you find people like Mr. David Brooks, busily making an obscenely profitable living by insuring that every time that subject is broached, it is smothered under an avalanche of Both Siderism.

They all know it, and they have known it all along, because they all feed at the same trough -- all depending on the same mob of paranoids and morally truncated imbeciles to pack their pews, pump up their political muscle, read their columns, buy their books, watched their teevee shows and, in general, make it possible for them to enjoy lives of tremendous prosperity and power.

The real difference between them is that Ingraham and Reed want to the GOP to drop the charade and start acting proudly and publicly in the same way they act in private, while traditional Party apparatchiks like Brooks and Edwards are much more deeply invested in the Straussian Noble Lie theory of governance, and are thus horrified by that thought

http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-new-new-new-new-new-right.html