A COUPLE of days ago Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry published a long essay in the National Review arguing that Republicans need to stop engaging in intra-party purity wars, and fighting politics as if it were a perpetual last stand against the teeming hordes of darkest Mordor, if they expect to get anything accomplished. Kevin Drum thinks the essay is "timid", however, because it doesn't include any concrete recommendations for changes in the GOP's programme. I think that's misguided. Ultimately the GOP will need to endorse some new policies, but it's also important to attack the politics of impending doom and factional purges as such. Messrs Ponnuru and Lowry are right to identify the problem as "an apocalyptic conservative politics":

It is a politics of perpetual intra-Republican denunciation. It focuses its fire on other conservatives as much as on liberals. It takes more satisfaction in a complete loss on supposed principle than in a partial victory, let alone in the mere avoidance of worse outcomes. It has only one tactic—raise the stakes, hope to lower the boom—and treats any prudential disagreement with that tactic as a betrayal.

For the authors, the problem with this kind of politics is that it doesn't work; there aren't enough conservatives in Congress, or in America, for the Alamo approach to win. But beyond the question of efficacy, or even of the particular issues on which it gains a toehold, this kind of ideological-purity feedback loop is a scary phenomenon in and of itself. And it extends well beyond the GOP's doomed shutdown brinkmanship this autumn, or even the battle over Obamacare. Ideological purity tests and apocalyptic pessimism have become entrenched features of Republican politics.

Last week, for example, "This American Life" reported on Josh Inglett, a 20-year-old student at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville whom Scott Walker, the state's Republican governor, nominated to serve on the state university system's board of regents. Mr Walker rescinded the nomination after right-wing websites reported that Mr Inglett, himself a Republican, had been one of the 1m Wisconsin voters who signed a Democratic-led petition to recall the governor in 2011, which led to an election that Mr Walker ultimately won. (State law forbids the use of partisan tests in appointments to the university system's board of regents.) A Democratic senator who asked Mr Walker not to rescind Mr Inglett's nomination called it "absolute McCarthyism", which, in this case, really doesn't seem like a stretch. Signing the petition also cost the job of a Republican judge with an impeccable set of endorsements from local police and attorneys; a challenger used his petition signature as a wedge to take him out in the next election.

Meanwhile in Texas, every Republican state senator is vastly more conservative than any of the state's Democrats; but being the least conservative Republican is a sure-fire way to get yourself challenged by a harder-line tea-party opponent, guaranteeing a perpetual rightward drift. David Dewhurst is the state's lieutenant governor, and was formerly known as a resident of planet Earth before losing the 2012 Senate primary to the tea-party movement's newest Galahad, Ted Cruz. In his re-election campaign, the newly wised-up Mr Dewhurst is calling for Barack Obama to be impeached. (Two counts, apparently: "trampling on our liberties", and "what he did in Benghazi".)

And so on. This is all familiar enough by now, but the point is that Republicans who attack the tone and tactics of tea-party politics, without explicitly disagreeing on policy grounds, are not dissenting in a merely cosmetic fashion. Indeed, many of the so-called policy planks in contemporary hard-right politics are more the product of a need to attack sitting GOP officeholders for supposed moderate treachery than they are the result of any serious or consistent conservative ideology. This is why, for example, when conservative policy wonks at the American Enterprise Institute sit down to come up with an alternative universal health-insurance plan, what they come up with shares enough features with Obamacare that GOP politicians have to reject it out of hand.

The subordination of policy to tactics is a feature of apocalyptic-extremist factional politics. It's a mistake to think that extremist parties are characterised by ideological rigidity; in fact, on any question on which there can be internal competition in such parties, there tends to be a succession of changes in position. Each shift produces apostates who can be purged on the basis of previously holding positions that have now been revealed as incorrect, and this provides opportunities for advancement to lower-ranking members. A party caught up in this dynamic can't take any policy positions on which it might be able to compromise with the opposition, or win new constituencies outside of existing insiders; the compromise would be a death sentence for the members who agree to it, and allegiance to new constituents is suspect in the eyes of existing ones. The GOP has to wrench itself out of this internal political spiral in order to make concrete moves on policy or even on the kind of image it wants to project to non-conservatives, and it makes sense for worried Republicans to take up this problem as an issue in its own right.

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