The “sane” Republicans have correctly pointed out, over and over again, that the Tea Party is in no meaningful sense of the word “conservative.” With the Republicans split and unable to govern, the Democrats take their rightful place as the true conservative party, the party of the American state, and the main problem with the nominally “conservative” theory of “2012 or never” against Obamacratic socialism becomes obvious: It was a fantasy. The war the fellows in the Minuteman costumes thought they were fighting was already lost generations if not centuries ago. Their only hope is in complete despair, the wishful fear that the whole thing might fall apart on its own, but the notion of a national constituency actively and aggressively in favor of national dissolution is an absurdity, since that polity would be asked to reach consensus over its insufficient consensus. Czechs and Slovaks were content to separate in part because, afterward, no one on the wrong side of the new, sensible ethnic and geographic border would have lost too much: The underlying consensus on the central political questions, on the outlines of the proper relationship of state and citizen, meant that each new nation would be as much two provinces within the emergent European and transnational liberal democratic super-state. Tea Party “anti-statism,” like libertarianism and anarchism more generally, cannot offer such guarantees, while the American people, to whatever extent there still is an American people, will tend to remain in favor of themselves. Their will can degenerate to the point that they lose the ability to resist, so cease to cling to life, and they or rather we may even be on that course, perhaps well on that course, but until the last moment all attempts to hasten the process will tend to retard it, since they provoke us, we who would have to constitute ourselves self-consciously as a people to vote for our own de-constitution, to re-experience whatever remnant shared vitality and instead re-constitute ourselves defensively against our would-be assassins.
If you want a more thorough diagnosis, Judis’ recent piece offered a good one: http://t.co/opQotliYIK Tweeting the link led to a twitter-logue with a guy who read like a cliche “Oathkeeper” type – his final tweet to me, after he was done with the $17T in debt and the Fed and “you people will get what you deserve” ended literally with an ominous assertion that he made an oath and intended to keep it.
It definitely doesn’t help their odds for secession that they tend towards “Real American” blather & imply that it is the liberals that should leave if anybody…