“They don’t want a fight at all, and that’s part of the problem,” Representative Mick Mulvaney, a South Carolina conservative, told me when I put this question to him last week. “The base has been waiting now for four years for a fight, and our leadership has never given it to them. We tried a little bit on Obamacare. We tried a little bit on immigration. But at the end we ultimately never stood up for what the base of the party wants. That’s why this is so critical.”

Elected in 2010, Mulvaney has become one of the conservatives most frustrated with the party leadership. But he’s also among the most transparent. One of the reasons Boehner and McConnell have never wanted a shutdown fight is because they know that it’s almost impossible for Republicans to emerge with a political victory. Republicans can protest as loudly as they want that it is Democrats causing the crisis by refusing to compromise—Why does President Obama prioritize funding for Planned Parenthood over money for our troops? is one talking point you can expect to hear repeatedly. But the general public is always going to be quicker to blame a government shutdown on the party that constantly rails about wanting to rein in the government. The sharp drop in standing that Republicans suffered during the 2013 shutdown bore this out, and it was only the equally damaging rollout of Obamacare that allowed them to recover so quickly ahead of the 2014 elections.

Mulvaney didn’t dispute the conventional wisdom that Republicans would lose the spin game of a shutdown over Planned Parenthood. But his argument in favor of trying anyway was revealing. The conservative base put Republicans in charge of Congress, and it is the constituency to which the leadership needs to be accountable. And what about the rest of the country? That’s the wrong audience, Mulvaney suggested. “My leadership is trying to appeal to independent and swing voters who don’t care what we do right now and won’t until two or three months before the election,” he told me. The base is paying attention now, in other words. Everyone else will forget about it come election time.

This is, of course, a remarkably cynical view of the current state of American democracy and the ever-shortening attention span of the electorate. But it is instructive as a way to view the latest confrontation on Capitol Hill. It also explains why Boehner has spent much of his speakership banging his head against the wall, and why Beltway insiders awoke Tuesday to read yet another story suggesting his future is in doubt. Mulvaney is not alone in his thinking. He’s secured the written commitment of 28 of his Republican colleagues to oppose any spending bill that does not defund Planned Parenthood—just about enough to force Boehner to rely on Democratic votes to keep the government open.