John Judis, We could be witnessing the death throes of the Republican Party (emphasis mine):

The battle over the shutdown has highlighted the cracks and fissures within the [Republican] party. The party’s leadership has begun to lose control of its members in Congress. The party’s base has become increasingly shrill and is almost as dissatisfied with the Republican leadership in Washington as it is with President Obama. New conservative groups have echoed, and taken advantage of, this sentiment by targeting Republicans identified with the leadership for defeat. And a growing group of Republican politicians, who owe their election to these groups, has carried the battle into the halls of Congress. That is spelling doom for the Republican coalition that has kept the party afloat for the last two decades…

Since the late 1960s, America has seen the growth of what the late Donald Warren in a 1976 book The Radical Center called “middle American radicalism.” It’s anti-establishment, anti-Washington, anti-big business and anti-labor; it’s pro-free market. It’s also prone to scapegoating immigrants and minorities. It’s a species of right-wing populism. It ebbed during the Reagan years, but began to emerge again under the patrician George H.W. Bush and found expression in support for Ross Perot and for Pat Buchanan with his “peasants with pitchforks.” And it undergirded the Republican takeovers of Congress in 1994. It ebbed during George W. Bush’s war on terror, but has re-emerged with a vengeance in the wake of the Great Recession, Obama’s election and expansion of government, and continuing economic stagnation…

Under pressure from grassroots radicals and the new outsider groups, the old Republican coalition is beginning to shatter. The single-issue and evangelical groups have been superseded by right-wing populist groups, which are generally identified with the Tea Party, although there is no single Tea Party organization. These groups can’t easily be co-opted by the party’s Washington leadership. And the business groups in Washington, who funded the party over the last two decades, have grown disillusioned with a party that appears to be increasingly held hostage by its radical base and by outsider groups. The newspapers are now filled with stories about business opposition to the shutdown strategy, and there are even hints of business groups backing challenges to Tea Party candidates. “The business community has got to stand up and say we are not going to back the most self-described conservative candidate. We are going to back the candidates that are the most rational,” says John Feehery, a former aide to DeLay and Hastert who is now president of Quinn Gillespie & Associates, a Washington lobbying firm.

What Washington business lobbyists say on-the-record about the House Republicans and about Tea Party activists pales before what they are willing to say if their names aren’t used. One former Republican staffer says of the anti-establishment groups, “They want to go in and fuck shit up. These non-corporate non-establishmentarian guys—that is exactly what they are doing. And the problem with that is obvious. What next? What happens after you fuck shit up?” Other lobbyists I talked to cited John Calhoun, Dixiecrats and Richard Hofstadter’s essay on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” to explain the rise of the populist right. It’s the kind of reference you’d expect to read in a New Republic article, but not necessarily in a conversation with a business lobbyist…

One could argue, of course, that the Republican Party will readapt to its rightwing base and eventually create a new majority of “true fiscal conservatives” who will disdain compromise. But there is reason to believe that Chocola and the Club for Growth will never achieve their objective. Rightwing populism, like its predecessor, Christian conservatism, is intense in its commitment, but ultimately limited in its appeal. Tea Party Republicans and the outsider groups probably had their greatest impact when they were still emerging phenomena in the 2010 elections. But when the Republican Party becomes identified with the radical right, it will begin to lose ground even in districts that Republicans and polling experts now regard as safe. That happened earlier with the Christian Coalition, which enjoyed immense influence within the Republican Party until the Republican Party began to be identified with it.

In Washington, today’s business lobbies may come to understand what the lobbies of the ‘50s grasped—that the Democratic Party is a small “c” conservative party that has sought to preserve and protect American capitalism by sanding off its rough edges. Joe Echevarria, the chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, recently told The New York Times, “I’m a Republican by definition and by registration, but the party seems to have split into two factions.” Echevarria added that while the Democrats also had an extreme faction, it had no power in the party, while the Republican’s extreme faction did. “The extreme right has 90 seats in the House,” he said. “Occupy Wall Street has no seats.” That realization could lead business to resume splitting its contributions, which would spell trouble for the Republicans.  [Ed.:  I’d be surprised if more than 1/4 of OWS people are Democrats.  My guess is that most are unenrolled and that there at least as many Greens and other third party supporters as Democrats.]

Republicans in Washington could repudiate their radical base and shun the groups that appeal to it. That is roughly what people like Feehery are suggesting. But the question, then, is what would be the Republican base? How would Republicans win elections? Are there enough rational Republicans to make up for the loss of the radical ones?

What is happening in the Republican Party today is reminiscent of what happened to the Democrats in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At that time, the Democrats in Washington were faced by a grassroots revolt from the new left over the war in Vietnam and from the white South over the party’s support for civil rights. It took the Democrats over two decades to do undo the damage—to create a party coalition that united the leadership in Washington with the base and that was capable of winning national elections. The Republicans could be facing a similar split between their base and their Washington leadership, and it could cripple them not just in the 2014 and 2016 elections, but for decades to come.

I think Judis’ characterization of Perot supporters is off-base but otherwise I think his assessment of “suburban revolutionaries” and the “fuck shit up” brigade’s lack of any realistic plan for what comes next is on-target.  (For the record, if Perot hadn’t demonstrated that he lacked the psychological make-up necessary for the job – he snapped under pressure – I would have voted for him.  I think Perot was much sharper and a more enlightened leader than many people gave him credit for.)

Matt Taibbi, Democrats Must Stop Ted Cruz’s Hollywood Ending:

Here’s the problem with this entire situation. Every minute that Cruz presses forward sinks the Republicans into a deeper political hole, and the Democrats know this. Despite the seemingly impenetrable advantage the Republicans have gained through gerrymandering over the years (retaining their House majority in 2012 despite a two million-plus popular vote deficit), the party is now in serious danger of losing the House in 2014.  Moreover, the shutdown debate has caused a massive schism within the Republican ranks, one symbolized by the open verbal combat that reportedly broke out between Cruz and other, less lunatic GOP Senators last week when the “reality caucus” discovered that Cruz had no exit strategy for this blow-it-all-to-hell stunt he’s pulling.