Earlier this month The Caucus' Michael Shear efficiently framed the GOP's predicament as three stand-alone developments urging one irreducible conflict: "the assumption of power by Republicans in the House," "the [Republican] presidential campaign," and "Tea Party lawmakers ... reshap[ing] the conversation in Congress and on the campaign trail as Republicans adapt their rhetoric to a new political power at the grass roots."
Their presidential candidates are already sniping at each other, each positioning him- or herself as the genuine standard-bearer of medieval, nihilistic GOP Writ; popular causes, such as DADT and START, have split the GOP's Congressional caucus and promise yet more divisions; and debates on spending, entitlements, fiscal sanity and specifically on raising the debt limit will push tea partying lawmakers to their own limits, which is to say, those of their base.
As Shear pungently summed things up: "What began as a story about divisions inside the Democratic Party has quickly become a vehicle for revealing the differences in political philosophy inside the Republican Party."
Those revealed differences, still in the development stage, nevertheless have progressed from the acute to the chronic.
From November, 2008 to roughly January-February of the following year, all the political buzz was about what Republicans would do -- what would they do? They had just taken a brutal shellacking from voters, Barack Obama's center-left vision navigated the political waters unopposed, and in this conservative vacuum there whirled GOP minds: What do we do? Veer left? Seek the middle? Stay right?
Because the GOP had no strategic leader at the time, by a kind of CommitteeThink it chose, naturally, the easiest route: it stuck to its philosophical status quo. It then got shoved further right by tea partiers.
But that far-right territory the GOP will not and cannot hold. Virtually everything -- from electoral demographic mutations to inescapable national necessities, such as tax hikes -- works against it. The GOP's reinvigoration through tea party fervor is a singular or perhaps two-time phenomenon; if Republicans are to remain a vital and material force in America's two-party system, then tea partyism is slated for doom.
For now, it's a crutch, a fix, a GOP addiction. But as our collective fiscal problems mount and loom as an undivertable monster to be engaged head-on -- without incinerating the hugely entrenched social fabrics of, say, Social Security and Medicare -- then irreconcilable tea partyism, like all abused narcotics, will become the GOP's worst internal enemy. Its shelf-life is painted in neon.
All of which is just another way of saying that it's not the center that can't hold. It's the right -- and that collision course with reality has by now progressed as the GOP's chronic and most internally corrosive problem.