It's always more fun to be a former elected official than someone actually in office. Bill Clinton is only the highest profile example; now, Jeb Bush has taken advantage of the freedom accorded by not facing election to lay some cleverly constructed truths at the feet of assorted Bloomberg reporters and editors. He mixed mainstream-media-bait comments about how today's Republican party wouldn't welcome either Reagan (he'd be "criticized for doing the things that he did") or his father, George HW Bush (they'd both have "a hard time"), with slightly more subtle nudges to his colleagues about the calcification of party lines.

"I hope we don't all have this march" toward irreversible partisanship, he said. "If someone is a conservative or a liberal, we're sent this little book that says, 'you must not veer."'

Of course, there are such books – in the sense that there are keepers of partisan orthodoxy on either side. Whether by virtue of temperament or power structure, however, it's the GOP that, right now, seems most sensitive – or maybe, most enthusiastic – about conformist tendencies. (And I'd guess the Obama re-election team is jealous.) Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, was one of the first to jump on Bush's remarks. That's not surprising: Norquist is the martinet behind one of the more literal books of rightwing moral instruction, the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which holds the signatory to oppose "any and all" tax increases.

An astounding 95% of elected Republicans have signed Norquist's contract. I am hard-pressed to name any single policy aim that has that kind of backing on the Democratic side. In the legislature itself, Democrats have more caucuses than caucus unity. Whereas the GOP has the Republican study committee, famous for pressuring lawmakers to push a strict agenda, one that even House Republicans worry is set by outside groups more intent on ideology than moving legislation forward. Last summer, representatives staged an impromptu protest against the group's attempt to generate votes against House speaker John Boehner's debt ceiling compromise.

For a more recent example, see, well, the past year or so of the Republican presidential primaries, a race defined by its finish line on the far right. Wherever they started, by the end of their campaigns, Romney and Santorum only gave voters as their choice varying degrees of extreme: who was the hungriest for war with Iran, the least amenable to women's rights, the keenest to repeal healthcare reform, the toughest on immigration.

It's no secret that the Obama campaign hopes that this extremism, paired with a portrait of Romney-the-job-killer, will undo his opponent in the fall. The plan has many flaws, mostly having to do with the Obama team's inability to mount a positive case for their own stewardship of the economy. But there's also an underlying cognitive dissonance to the argument: to make Romney's past as a corporate hatchet man ring true, he must be painted as a cold pragmatist – and his obvious pragmatism gives his extremist rhetoric the kind of shaky foundation that might allow moderate voters to discount it.

And as president, Romney could very well negotiate the narrow-but-visible range of ideological latitude that George W Bush wiggled in. Progressives tend to forget that W disappointed many conservatives: he failed to follow through on turning social services into a "faith-based" enterprise and he practically invented what some bemoan as "big government conservatism". Traditionally, though, presidents have the luxury of defining their own course, with incumbency as the most powerful card in any re-election campaign.

On the other hand, it's no wonder that congressional representatives, low men on the Washington totem poll, are the easiest prey for anyone with a large bank account and the promise of activist involvement. They make campaign promises and, two years later, must face up to them. The difference in these post Citizens United days is that the promises aren't to constituents, they're to American Crossroads, the Club for Growth and random bored billionaires.

The power of these outside ideology police raises the question as to whether any of the polarization that has frozen Congress is for real. Is there a little Mitt in everyone who prostrates themselves for donations, their very willingness to bend their beliefs a sign that they aren't all that enthusiastic about enforcing them? We shall find out, because the mounting level of influence levied by conservative extremists has shaped a party that looks very little like America. As the leadership and pocketbooks of the GOP move right, the country has stayed mostly in the center. Republican officials have been able to believe their own funhouse mirror reflection because the money keeps working, keeps winning. Romney's own skilful manipulation of the Super Pac system could make for a victory that sustains the illusion of a relationship between the goals of the party and the goals of most Americans.

And unlike past administrations, where the president could reasonably push back on donors, the sheer amount of money involved in this election raises the question of just how more beholden Romney would be to the people who put him in office.

The Republican party rests on fault line that has been papered over with cash. Only if Romney wins, can they ignore its existence for a while longer.