Most people who follow politics are aware that something unusual is going on in the Republican party — unusual relative to major conservative parties in other developed democracies and unusual relative to American history. GOP leaders no longer appear in control of their own agenda. Instead, they are being dragged from crisis to failure to embarrassment and back to crisis by the most extreme elements of their coalition. The far right has captured the party.

Over at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, where she was a fellow this spring, longtime New York Times political reporter Jackie Calmes has released a long, fascinating discussion paper on the role of the conservative media in this state of affairs: "'They Don’t Give a Damn about Governing': Conservative Media’s Influence on the Republican Party."

Conservative media has gotten big enough to sway elections

There's been dedicated conservative media since the post–World War II years, and it has always had the same concerns — the nefarious role of immigrants, the perfidy of elites, the corruption of the welfare state — but for most of that time, it simply hasn't been big, well-funded, or stable enough to serve as conservatives' only media. It existed as a hectoring presence on the periphery of the Republican Party.

That began changing in the '90s with talk radio and Fox News, both of which found enormous financial success and signaled to wealthy conservatives that media is worth funding (and could potentially take down a president).

The early success of Rush Limbaugh and Fox prompted an explosion of new voices, shows, magazines, and (more recently) digital media like blogs and podcasts. There are now hundreds of conservative media outlets, not only the national ones you've heard of but regional, local, and niche outlets that speak directly and exclusively to the conservative (read: older white male) demographic. It's a full media ecosystem; there's no longer any need for conservatives to stray outside it to stay informed, or "informed."

Alongside the growth in media (and funded by many of the same people) has emerged a newly muscular ideological machinery. Together they form what political scientist Richard Meagher half-jokingly calls "the vast right-wing conspiracy":

Conservative talk radio, print publications, television networks, and internet sites have numerous connections, both direct and indirect, with the think tanks, advocacy organizations, academic research centers, and foundations that develop and promote the Right's policy agenda.

Populist right-wing media has become the primary channel through which conservatives are educated, organized, and activated. (As Calmes documents, it has never been the same on the left; despite many attempts, partisan left-wing media has never approached the size or influence of its conservative counterpart. The left's organizing tends to emerge instead from advocacy and activist organizations.) A little attention from regional talk-radio hosts can muster hundreds of phone calls to politicians, along with protests and donations. In several cases, right-wing media has coordinated successful primary challenges to members of Congress (see: Eric Cantor).

The result is a GOP that is terrified, above all, of displeasing its most vocal, most ideological, most extreme elements.

Media doesn't need to win elections to profit

The problem is that right-wing media is in no way dependent on the political success of the GOP. In fact, it's almost the opposite: The more the party establishment fails to deliver on the far right's (wildly unrealistic) demands, the more the audience feels betrayed, and the angrier it gets. That means more clicks, more phone calls, more engagement. It is to right-wing media's great benefit for the party to engage in a series of dramatic, doomed protest gestures like shutting down the government or attempting to repeal Obamacare for the 47th time. It stokes the outrage machine.

Conservative media outlets and activists have entered into a self-reinforcing cycle of mutually supported radicalization. They have everything to gain by demonstrating their ideological purity and nothing to gain from compromise or nuance:

[Recently retired GOP Representative Tom] Latham and other Republicans complain [that] many in that media – in their zeal for audience share – willfully ignore the realities of a legislative process designed by the Founders to require deliberation, checks and balances, and compromise. "They will not take 80 percent – it’s got to be 100 percent or you’re not pure," Latham said. "They don’t give a damn about governing, or about anything than being pure themselves. And it’s causing more people to be concerned about primaries than ever before. I just don’t see – with continual pounding of the drums in the media and these outside groups – I don’t know how you function, I really don’t. I don’t know how you pass appropriation bills this year."

The party establishment encouraged the rise of the right-wing media and exploited the Tea Party for electoral advantage, but now it has awakened a monster it can't control.

The basic outlines of this story are probably familiar to most people reading Vox, but Calmes goes into lots of detail and elicits tons of great quotes from exasperated Republicans, some of whom were even brave enough to comment on record. What's striking about the party establishment figures quoted in the piece — the politicians, aides, and consultants who suffer the brunt of the perpetual rage machine — is that they are, almost without exception, despairing.

No one knows how to stop the self-reinforcing cycle, even though everyone knows it is rendering the GOP incapable of governing or attracting new demographics, without which the party is fated to become a regionally based, ethnically homogenous niche party unable to win the presidency. In all the dozens of quotes given to Calmes, there isn't a single one that proposes a solution.

So this is likely what we have to look forward to in coming years: more radicalization on the right, more outrage and obstructionism, and the GOP with a lock on the House through at least 2022. Should be fun.

No one should be surprised by this trend

Mainly you should go read Calmes's piece, but I do want to offer two semi-critical notes here.

First, I think the paper would have benefited from taking more note of broader social and political trends. One paper can't cover everything, of course, but it's important to remember the broader polarization in which right-wing media flourished. I've written about that polarization before and won't rehash it, except to say that it goes much deeper than politics; it is cultural, racial, and geographic as well. Contrary to Obama's hopeful 2004 Democratic convention speech, there really is a Red America.

That's the context for the rise of right-wing media, which is not some anomaly or accident, but an inevitable outcome of larger social forces. Understood that way, it's clear that it will take more to solve the problem than a few centrist Republicans speaking out. And it's clear that the much-discussed moderation of the party, which outsiders always believe is right around the corner, may be distant still. The process of polarization is likely to be meliorated, if at all, by "cohort replacement," which is a polite way of saying that the aging white men so furious at the loss of "their country" will eventually die off.

Second, I couldn't help being struck by Calmes's comments in this podcast about the paper:

The first thing she says is that before launching her research project, she wasn't really aware of right-wing media beyond Limbaugh and National Review and was surprised at the size and radicalism of the right-wing media/activist network.

I may be reading too much into that (or listening too much into it, as it were), but it seems to me that someone like Calmes, who has been reporting on national politics since 1984, ought to be more familiar with the dynamics driving the right. The radicalization of the right, driven by big-donor money and conservative media, is the defining feature of US politics today.

One of the longstanding critiques of mainstream media on the left, from the very beginning of the blogosphere, was that reporters in the Beltway "Village" failed to grasp modern conservatism and wrote about it in such a way as to sand down and mute its extremity. Their attachment to a certain mental model of politics — "both sides" with their mirror-image extremes and centers — made them blind to "asymmetrical polarization." In fact, people are still making that critique; here's Paul Krugman from just a few days ago.

Calmes is probably not a fair target for that critique. She certainly deserves kudos for attacking this subject directly. But there are still plenty of mainstream political reporters who cling to the both-sides illusion to this day, imagining politics as a sober business conducted by Very Serious People in suits, premised on a shared set of facts and assumptions. But as the far right sends the Republican Party through an ever-more-absurd series of showdowns and tantrums, the illusion is fading. Now lots of established journalists seem to have moved on to the bargaining stage of grief, holding out hope that the Adults will once again take charge.

But that train has left the station. The GOP is trapped in a downward spiral now, and only something truly catastrophic to the party's fortunes could break it out. For now, thanks to an idiosyncratic combination of (old, white) voter intensity, gerrymandering, and billionaire funding, radicalism still works for Republicans, perhaps not at the presidential level, but certainly in Congress. That's likely to continue for quite some time, rendering American democracy dysfunctional at a time when it desperately needs to act. That's depressing to lots of journalists (and to me), but getting past it begins with identifying and describing it clearly, without nostalgia or false hope.