what we basically see is we saw previously power move away from the Republican old guard,

the Bushites, the McConnell's, towards Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and this populist conservative

media. Now in the age of social media when Matt Gates can assemble for himself a direct channel

to an audience of two million people and can throw up a fundraising link to those people and

immediately generate campaign funds by himself without a reliance on the party structure,

this really radically decentralizes authority. So you end up in this situation where in January

you had everybody pushing in one direction and a critical mass of Republican back ventures,

nevertheless holding out until the very last moment until they were able to get things like

this motion to vacate rule and other demands that have made it extremely difficult for

Republicans to govern. It's difficult to map this on to an interesting sophisticated

conversation about the sort of rifts within the party over policy or over populist economics

because it doesn't seem to be a conflict over some kind of like material stakes.

It doesn't seem to be really ideological in any kind of robust way. You could say that it's strategic

but as you pointed out there isn't really a strategy here for this redounding to the benefit

of conservative goals. Yeah, the substantive effect of the brinksmanship by Gates and his allies

has been to push policy in the opposite direction that they ostensibly want it to go.

It led again to McCarthy having to rely more on House Democrats to avoid a debt limit breach

and thus a more liberal budget agreement that was reached back in April. You see earlier with

the Tea Party back in the Obama years we didn't cut Medicare and Social Security which the Tea Party

ostensibly wanted to do not because of Barack Obama who put those on the table but because they

wouldn't take yes for an answer in terms of a compromise that would have included any tax

increases and so you know you kind of see time after time at the the brinksmanship on the right

...