How did we get from Ryan’s euphoric welcome to a government paralyzed by its ruling party’s inability to manage itself? The short answer is that this Republican Party is no longer the Republican Party, inasmuch as that term once referred to a cohesive group of people who shared a similar ideology for how government should work. No party is a monolith, of course. But this majority is a series of particularly uneasy alliances between people whose interests, until now, have overlapped just enough to make it expedient for them to share a label. It is an electoral majority, but as the shutdown debate makes clear, it is not a governing one.

The 2008 election of Barack Obama introduced the last period of unified government in the United States, with Democrats winning so many contests in such a convincing manner that many wondered aloud if the Republican Party would have to tack sharply to the middle of the ideological spectrum in order to avoid going the way of the Whigs. The GOP answered those questions in convincing fashion two years later, riding a wave of anti-Obamacare and anti-bailout sentiment to pick up 63 House seats—the largest midterm elections shift since the Great Depression—and securing a majority in the lower chamber that it has yet to relinquish.

Many of these new lawmakers were not like Republicans of old. They were Tea Partiers, members of a nascent far-right faction that solicited the support of deficit watchers, libertarians, immigration hawks, values voters, jingoists, “Don’t tread on me” types, birther conspiracy theorists, and other groups unhappy with the direction in which they believed the GOP was moving, all huddled together under the same big tent. Sarah Palin, the first politician with a national profile who managed to appeal to each of these constituencies, went on to become a sort of patron saint of the movement after her ticket’s loss in 2008. Upstart Tea Party candidates ousted establishment Republicans in primaries (goodbye, Bob Bennett) and beat favored Democrats in general elections (hello, Scott Brown), relying on grassroots enthusiasm to overcome their lack of national party dollars. Aspiring politicians learned in 2010 that even in an era of Democratic power, by striking just the right balance of fiscal conservatism, limited government, and tacit bigotry, they could cobble together enough support to put their candidacies over the top.

While Tea Party mania subsided after 2010 and 2012, the underlying sentiments are still very much around. Senators like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Mike Lee have emerged as relatively young and buzzy GOP voices who are famously unafraid to ignore McConnell’s directives, and the 31 identified members of the ultra-right House Freedom Caucus—all but five of whom were elected in 2010 or later—were basically able to scuttle Paul Ryan’s first Obamacare repeal attempt by themselves in March. The presidency of Donald Trump, who took five years to go from unofficial leader of the birther movement to Republican nominee for the White House, is possible because of the secrets to winning elections that the the Tea Party unlocked.

This emergent path to victory—when in doubt, tilt right—has been great for the candidates who followed it all the way to Washington. But over the past year, it has been a disaster for Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, the two men tasked with getting the various factions in the same room and convincing them to agree on something. “The House Freedom Caucus votes almost universally against any spending bills,” says a former Republican member of the House Appropriations Committee. “And if you lose their votes, you can’t pass bills unless you get Democrats, too.” For years, the party's bomb-throwers worked so diligently to erect roadblocks to President Obama’s agenda that they never bothered to agree on an agenda of its own. In 2016, Ryan and McConnell earned the keys to the car, but to their surprise, they’re still fighting for control of the steering wheel.