Yes, conservatives, please oust Mitch McConnell

Yes, conservatives, please oust Mitch McConnell

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These days, angry conservatives seem to get much more excited about campaigns to punish insufficiently conservative Republicans than they do about campaigns to actually defeat Democrats. This is maybe the result of Obama’s reelection, because most Republican losses in the modern era are followed by angry calls for the party to be more conservative. One of the most prominent of the groups currently capitalizing on the fervor is the Senate Conservatives Fund, a group that has made a lot of money shouting fantasies about killing

Obamacare. Now they are going to spend some of that money on defeating Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, which is a very silly thing for conservatives to spend money on.

Oh, but they hate McConnell. Conservatives hate McConnell so, so much. Erick Erickson, a reliable indicator of the mind-set of the “shout harder and we’ll win!” caucus, is sending the Senate Conservatives Fund money “to help with their fight.” The Senate Conservatives Fund has already been running ads attacking him for not defunding Obamacare, so endorsing his challenger is really just the logical next step.

Most of the ways in which the apocalyptic death-cult activist arm of the conservative movement is sabotaging the Republican Party will only be apparent in the medium-term future. Thanks to our political system’s two-party bias, methods of House district-drawing, and the demographics of midterm and statewide electorates, the party will remain competitive for a while even as the percentage of Americans who despise Republicans grows. Stuff like the shutdown and default threat probably doesn’t threaten Republican control of the House that much. Sometimes, though, conservatives try to take immediate action to lessen the actual power of their party. This is one of those times.