The collapse of the Republican intellectual edifice

Facts haven't been kind to Republican ideology lately. For years, really, the eminent apocalypse upon which they depend has failed to materialize (like Jesus, lol). Chait walks us through the details:

Changes in the way we think about the world are not “news” in the classic sense — they occur gradually, without discrete events to signal them. But they matter. Two such developments have come together recently, both reported in the New York Times. The first is the collapse of intellectual support for the notion that immediate austerity can boost economic growth. The second is a growing consensus that health-care-cost inflation is slowing for deep structural reasons, rather than having undergone a mere temporary dip from the recession. These trends have something in common: They blow to smithereens the intellectual foundations of the Obama-era Republican policy agenda.
During the last four years, the hoary Republican nostrums of lower taxes, spending, and regulation have cohered into a specific view of the world.
…
Even with the data on their side, none of the advocates of Obamacare is nearly as certain the law will succeed as conservatives like Levin are that it will fail. That is a testament only to the overweening ideological certainty that pervades the right.
The slowdown in health-care costs is provisional. Perhaps it will peter out, and Obamacare will require massive revisions. Perhaps, too, the interest rate spike Ryan has been warning of will suddenly appear.
But the key thing is that the conservative program since 2009 has hinged on the absolute truth of both these provisions. The certainty of the imminent debt crisis, and the certainty that Obamacare would worsen rather than ameliorate it, undergirded the party’s entire strategy. It is not merely the ideological extremism but Levin’s dialectical certainty that the welfare state will collapse upon itself that has driven the party’s refusal to compromise. Why not meet Obama halfway, see what we have learned in a few years' time? Because, he wrote, half-measures “would make real reforms less likely, by letting our leaders persuade themselves they have dealt with entitlements when in fact they would have only bought a little time.” There is no point in buying time to learn more about the nature and scale of the problem when your ideology has already furnished the answer.

Indeed.