Why the GOP Fringe Sets the Party Agenda

As a former Republican and city committee member activist, at times I wonder how the Republican Party became so insane.  Yes, I often discuss the GOP leadership's pact with the Devil - i.e., the Christian Right and then the Tea Party - as part of the cause.  And then there's the issue of the near complete flight of moderates from the party as has enveloped my entire extended family of "Rockefeller Republicans."  But that still doesn't fully explain why the most insane, theocratic and generally delusional elements of the GOP base now seem to set the party's agenda.  David Frum, a conservative not too well loved by the GOP base since he's rational and is willing to yell out "the emperor has no clothes" as a premise that may partly explain the demise of a once rational and generally objective fact embracing political party.  He also focuses on the fact that it is the alleged small government loving red states and the elderly who in fact suck up a disproportionate share of federal government dollars.  Why does the word "hypocrites" spring to mind?  Here are highlights from Frum's column that is written in the context of his new book:

Cindy asks:

The Democrats seem to have found a way to marginalize the far fringes of their base without completely losing their vote, while the Republicans seem currently to have been overwhelmed and taken over by their far fringes. Assuming you agree with that rather generic statement, why do you think that the GOP has been less successful in holding their middle? And, how do you think they can pull back from this current trend? Or, do you think it's possible at this point for that to happen?

About 20% of America calls itself liberal; about 40% calls itself conservative. That asymmetry explains a great deal of the difference between the parties. The Democrats cannot remotely convince themselves that their base can deliver elections for them. They know they must work to broaden their coalition—and to restrain their base. Their base knows it too. 

The bigger Republican base, however, can imagine itself as representing the majority of the country, or anyway, something close to it. All that's needed is one last push! And when you are so close to having everything your own way—why compromise?

That aversion to compromise is intensified by a strange fact of American government. Republicans, the anti-government party, depend on the votes of the elderly, the affluent, and the rural—in other words, the American government's redistributional winners. From the point of view of those voters, any compromise will bring only bad news to them. They like things the way they are now! And—in contrast to more prosperous times in the past—they don't today feel they have anything like the margin of security that would allow them to share.

This is one of the major themes of Patriots: the most affluent have become the most anxious. My selfish protagonist, heir to a mustard fortune, stands in for these winners—and then breaks with them, not because he is so very remarkably generous, but because something in him recoils and rebels at a political game that heaps accumulating rewards on the winners—and only accumulating penalties on the losers.

Do I see hope for such a trend in real life? I don't know. But we need it.

Greed and the fear of change (and those deemed "other") are, in short, their principle motivation.  What makes the utter hypocrisy even worse is that they then wrap themselves in religion and profess their piety even as they flush the Gospel message down the toilet.