There’s been a lot of discussion about the reaction of Democrats–particularly the president and Hillary Clinton–to the Oregon massacre. But there’s been less analysis o the radicalization of Republican views that has made both of them all but give up on any legislative fix to the problem of gun violence. I discussed this at some length today at TPMCafe.

What neither Obama nor Clinton did was focus on begging congressional Republicans to end their total ban on legislation addressing such outrages as the gun show loophole to gun purchase background checks.
Of course, that would have been a waste of time. For even if we are now seeing a polarization of Democratic opinion on guns away from any idea of compromising with a GOP that is totally beholden to the gun lobby, it is a response to an earlier and much more radical polarization of Republicans. And to a remarkable extent, the default position of conservatives has less and less to do with arguments about the efficacy of gun regulation or the need for guns to deter or respond to crime. Instead, it’s based on the idea that the main purpose of the Second Amendment is to keep open the possibility of revolutionary violence against the U.S. government.
This was once an exotic, minority view even among gun enthusiasts who tended to view the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to gun ownership not to overthrow the government but to supplement the government’s use of lethal force against criminals. Treating the Second Amendment as an integral legacy of the American Revolution appealed to gun rights advocates who sought firm ground against regulations with no possibility of compromise.
But more importantly, it gave a dangerous edge to the claims of conservative extremists–who recently began calling themselves “constitutional conservatives”–that their ideology of absolute property rights, religious rights and even fetal rights had been permanently established by the Founders who added in the Second Amendment to ensure any trespassing on their “design” by “tyrants” or popular majorities could and should be resisted.
Nowadays this revolutionary rationale for gun rights is becoming the rule rather than the exception for conservative politicians and advocates. Mike Huckabee, a sunny and irenic candidate for president in 2008, all but threatened revolutionary violence in his recent campaign book for the 2016 cycle, God, Guns, Grits and Gravy:

If the Founders who gave up so much to create liberty for us could see how our government has morphed into a ham-fisted, hypercontrolling “Sugar Daddy,” I believe those same patriots who launched a revolution would launch another one. Too many Americans have grown used to Big Government’s overreach. They’ve been conditioned to just bend over and take it like a prisoner [!]. But in Bubba-ville, the days of bending are just about over. People are ready to start standing up for freedom and refusing to take it anymore.

Dr. Ben Carson, another candidate thought to be a mild-mannered Christian gentleman, recently disclosed that he used to favor modest gun control measures until he came to realize the importance of widespread gun ownership as a safeguard against “tyranny.”

“When you look at tyranny and how it occurs, the pattern is so consistent: Get rid of the guns,” Carson told USA Today.

Combined with Carson’s signature belief that “progressives” are undertaking a conspiracy to impose “tyranny” via stealth and “political correctness,” one might fear he thinks the time for taking up arms is relatively near, and would be particularly justified if any gun regulations were enacted.
Perhaps the most surprising statement on this subject from a Republican presidential candidate was by a rare figure who dissents from the right-to-revolution talk, per this report from Sahil Kapur at TPM a few months ago:

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s argument that the Second Amendment provides the “ultimate check against government tyranny” is a bit too extreme for potential 2016 rival and fellow Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
“Well, we tried that once in South Carolina. I wouldn’t go down that road again,” Graham said, in an apparent reference to the Civil War. “I think an informed electorate is probably a better check than, you know, guns in the streets.”

Graham joked about this, but liberals generally are not amused by the suggestion that “patriotic” Americans should be stockpiling guns in case “they”–it’s not clear who, of course–decide it’s time to start shooting police officers and members of the armed forces in defense of their liberties, which in some cases are perceived to be extremely broad. Indeed, a lot of Second Amendment ultras appear to think the right to revolution is entirely up to the individual revolutionary. Here’s Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, the darling of the GOP Class of 2014, talking about this contingency in 2012:

I have a beautiful little Smith & Wesson, 9 millimeter, and it goes with me virtually everywhere…But I do believe in the right to carry, and I believe in the right to defend myself and my family — whether it’s from an intruder, or whether it’s from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.

You can wonder, as I often do, how people like Ernst would react to such rhetoric if it were coming from a member of a black nationalist or Islamist group. But clearly, there’s no point in progressives seeking any “compromise” with them on gun issues. They can only be defeated by a true mass social movement supporting reasonable gun regulation. But it’s important to understand that according to the Cult of the Second Amendment, opponents of gun measures have every right to fire back, literally.

The “right to revolution” talk on the Right needs to stop now.

I’d like to add a note to what the previous Staff post had to say about President Obama’s remarks on the community college shootings in Oregon yesterday, as I expressed at Washington Monthly:

It has to be the most candid presidential reaction to breaking news in my memory; Obama even angrily mocked the ritualistic character of his own past reactions to gun massacres.
But the center of his argument is the one I keep making here: America is mainly exceptional among advanced democratic nations not in our personal or economic liberty, but in our strange belief that letting everyone stockpile weapons is essential to the preservation of our freedom, and in the consequences of that strange belief. That’s what the worship of the most extreme interpretation possible of the Second Amendment, fed by the gun lobby and politicians (mostly, though not exclusively, conservatives) has wrought. And yes, it’s something that can make you angry.

Is knowing that in other countries you cannot buy military weapons at all, or if you can you will certainly be subject to extensive scrutiny, the kind of thing that makes you “proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free!”? I hope not. But the more I hear conservatives tout the Second Amendment as the guarantor of all liberties on the theory that we need to be able to prepare for the violent overthrow of the government if we don’t like what elections or court decisions produce, the more I worry about the exceptional challenges we face in dealing with violence.

There’s been a bunch of dubious coverage of the “civil war” between the congressional Republican leadership and insurgent conservatives, featuring even more dubious coverage of John Boehner’s decision to “sacrifice” his gavel, which in practical terms means a year of fun and sun in Florida followed by an extremely lucrative lobbying career. Beyond that, there’s a lot of misunderstanding of how this will all play out in Congress, as I discussed at TPMCafe:

[T]he blessings Boehner has vouchsafed Washington could turn out to be ephemeral. As the budget wizard Stan Collender has observed, the avoidance of a shutdown this week has massively increased the odds of a shutdown in December. And Ted Cruz could personally wreck the dreams of those who imagine a brief Era of Good Feelings where Boehner and House Democrats liberate all sorts of gridlocked legislation.
So does that mean congressional Republicans are doomed to perpetually refight the internal battles that led to Boehner’s resignation? No, not at all. No matter what happens in December, there will likely follow an intra-party election year truce in Congress (though probably not on the presidential nomination primary trail). And then, if Republicans win the White House and hang onto control of Congress, most of the fighting will go away as the party comes together joyfully to implement most of the conservative movement’s agenda.
This last conclusion may come as a shock to those used to hearing about various struggles for the soul of the Republican Party, or the many cries of treason aimed at congressional leaders from the Right and from the grassroots. But what must be understood is that virtually all of these conflicts revolve around arguments over strategy and tactics, not principles, goals or policies.
Every single congressional Republican is for repealing Obamacare. They all, even the most egregious RINOs, oppose the Iran Nuclear Deal. All but a very small handful favor defunding Planned Parenthood, criminalizing abortions to the maximum extent the Supreme Court allows, slashing upper-end and corporate taxes, dumping Medicaid on the states, and cutting safety net funding while boosting defense spending. The fighting has been over how to advance these goals when Republicans do not entirely control the federal government. If they do entirely control the federal government, the fighting will mostly go away, or will migrate to new ideological demands that are too extreme to contemplate just now.
The “moderation” in the GOP that conservatives attack and the MSM applauds will look very different if Republicans are no longer faced with immovable Democratic opposition at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue. This should have been made plain back in the summer of 2012, when plans for a post-election conservative policy blitz utilizing the budget reconciliation process–which disposes of filibusters–were circulating on the breeze of GOP hopes that Mitt Romney would win and inherit a Republican-controlled Senate as well.
Since then the targets of such a single-party offensive have only grown: presidential executive orders on carbon emissions and immigration; Obama diplomatic efforts; the Obama “tilt” in judicial appointments; along with such hardy perennials as Obamacare, the New Deal and Great Society entitlement programs, and progressive taxation. And without question, the “treachery” of John Roberts has ensured that conservative litmus tests for the Supreme Court will be stricter and more focused on purely predictable conservative policy outcomes than ever before.
If, of course, Republicans lose a third consecutive presidential election, the current battles over strategy and tactics might reemerge with a vengeance, as conservatives grow frantic over the frightful damage being done to the America of their imagination by the free-spending, tyrannical, Muslim-loving, race-card-playing and baby-killing Democrats who somehow keep getting elected. And at that point pragmatic Republicans may become truly, not just strategically, moderate in counseling their compatriots that it’s time to stop pursuing the fever dreams of the Goldwater campaign.

It’s just another indicator that this is going to be a very, very high-stakes election in 2016.

We’re all going to be treated to an orgy of inside baseball over the weekend about the genesis of House Speaker John Boehner’s resignation, and lots of weepy stuff about his sacrifice in the national interest. Indeed, some hands are wringing over the terrible weakness of the contemporary Speakership, as though that is some hallowed Washington Institution.
Asked by Politico to comment on that dire possibility today, here’s what I said:

I’m afraid I have to challenge the premise of a Politico question again. The Boehner resignation didn’t show the demise of the Speakership, but its abiding strength. Think about it: Congress avoided (more than likely) a federal government shutdown; angry conservatives got a scalp; and Boehner himself got the clock ticking early on the one-year lobbying ban that’s the only thing standing between him and vast wealth. Everybody wins!

More fundamentally, the problems with the House since 2010 have less to do with the power or powerlessness of the Speaker than with the inability of certain Members–and the radicalized conservative movement they represent–to recognize the limitations of the House as an institution in an era of divided government. Many conservatives became furious at Boehner and the GOP Establishment for failing to keep promises they had no business making. If everybody stops pretending a House majority can tell a president of another party what to do, the House and the speakership will be healthier institutions.

To put it another way, the problem that led to Boehner’s resignation isn’t going away other than temporarily, even with a different personality holding the gavel. What’s required is an end to the ideological delusion that leads conservatives to believe they are destined to have their way.

This presidential nominating cycle, certainly on the Republican side, is not following any sort of rulebook. And so it’s inevitable the bible of the nominating process from a political science point of view is coming under fresh scrutiny, as I explained today at the Washington Monthly:

Regular readers know I enjoy expressing irreverent thoughts about The Party Decides, the 2008 tome by political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller that is often quoted like Holy Writ by academicians and even some journalists as the final work on presidential nominating contests. That’s not because I don’t respect the authors and the scholarship involved in this book, or doubt that it captures some important insights about the interplay of party elites, candidates and primary voters. It’s more that I think the small sample involved, the close cases treated as not so close at all, and above all, some of the simplistic interpretations being made of the data make the book and its expositors valuable but not definitive. Perhaps the most annoying thing about the usages of the book (I won’t attribute it to the authors) is the insistence on bean-counting elected official endorsements as the be-all and end-all of who’s where in the Invisible Primary and who’s going to win once voting begins. I know a lot of political practitioners, and none of them place that high a value on accumulating such endorsements unless they happen in an early primary or caucus state.
But now comes Vox‘s Andrew Prokop with a skilled deconstruction of the idea party elites control presidential nominations, which is obviously looking pretty dubious this year as three candidates virtually no elected officials or organized constituency groups are going to endorse–Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina–continue to dominate the field. Not only have party elites failed to get behind a single candidate; they have so far signally failed to veto a candidate they have clearly and mightily sought to destroy, namely Trump.
Prokop backtracks to earlier nomination contests and concludes the domination of party elites is mostly clear in cycles when the nominee was pretty obvious, and that voters may have independently played a stronger role than later acknowledged in breaking ties. The party as defined by elites did not, after all, “decide” the Democratic nomination in 2004 and 2008, and arguably not the 2008 GOP nomination either. And there have been a significant number of cases–the 1984 Hart challenge to Mondale, the 2000 Bradley challenge to Gore, and even the 2012 Santorum challenge to Romney–where some relatively small changes in single-state primary outcomes might have changed everything, regardless of what “the establishment” wanted.
In defense of the “party decider” faction, they do generally adopt a definition of “elites” that’s broader than what journalists tend to assume; they include organized constituency and ideological groups like the antichoicers and the Club for Growth on the Republican side and unions on the Democratic side. And it’s possible their basic theories will be confirmed by this year’s Democratic contest, where Hillary Clinton is rolling up indicia of elite support rare for a non-incumbent, or even the GOP contest, where a late decision by elites to get behind a single candidate like Rubio or Bush could still have a big impact.

But it doesn’t look like one of those years where any analyst, academic or journalistic, ought to feel very smug in making predictions.