The Rise Of Apocalyptic Conservatism Made The Shutdown Inevitable

As you've probably read elsewhere already, talks seem to have definitively broken down and we're going to have our shutdown. I wrote for TAP last week about why this was largely inevitable:

In ordinary times, you might think that an over-the-top grassroots base would be restrained by party elites. But Tea Party millennialism is reinforced, not constrained, by key conservatives. Matt Continetti of the Weekly Standard published a long article this week accusing liberals of "paranoid" dislike of the billionaire Koch brothers, who have emerged as the leading money-men of the American right. But according to Continettit's own reporting, it's the Kochs who seem paranoid. David Koch said to Continetti, "He's the most radical president we've ever had as a nation," he said, "and has done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we've ever had." Koch attributed this to Obama's admiration for his father, who, he explains "was a hard-core economic socialist in Kenya."

On this theory, despite his stated views, Obama is secretly a hard-core economic socialist, an ideology he picked up from his father without actually speaking to him. Newt Gingrich, who stands right at the center of the money men and the grassroots, worried on Monday about his grandchildren. "By the time they're my age," he fretted, "they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American." And why shouldn't secular atheism and radical Islam coexist if Obama's brand of hard-core socialism can bring record profits to corporate America? [...]

That the midterm elections change this calculus is clear. But the rise of apocalyptic conservatism does more than shift the terms of the negotiation. It likely makes compromise impossible.

I don't like it any more than you.