If that happens, I’ll be eating a second helping of crow. So much for journalistic predictions.

There’s still, of course, a tiny chance that Buchanan will stop short of making the final break with the party that nurtured him and that he has served loyally under Presidents Reagan and Nixon. But after watching him tell Tim Russert on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” that he won’t endorse the Republican nominee, that the GOP has become “a Xerox copy” of the Democratic Party and that he is leaning “strongly” in the direction of jumping into the Reform ring, most observers have concluded that he has indeed made the necessary psychological leap already.

For Buchanan, this switch must be nearly as difficult as if he were to leave the Catholic Church. But it’s possible that, like many people nearing retirement age, he feels he has only one last chance to make his mark. Some older people feel liberated from social pressures that shackle their juniors, and Buchanan may be one of them.

The amazing thing is that he and his inner circle of advisors and funders think he actually can win. As my colleague Doug Ireland and I reported in the Nation recently, two days after the Republican straw poll in Ames, Iowa, the entire team met at Buchanan’s home to discuss Pat’s future.

With the exception of his wife, Shelley, who said nothing, everyone favored a switch to Reform. Their reasoning makes sense: With billionaire Steve Forbes and activist Gary Bauer soaking up the social conservative vote, Buchanan has little chance of breaking through in the early GOP primaries as he did in 1992 and 1996.

By contrast, the Reform Party nomination is wide open, and the party’s candidate will get $12.6 million in public funds for the general election, along with a shot at the presidential debates. Combine disaffected conservatives with Perot independents, Reagan Democrats and trade-unionists (like the busloads of Teamsters who showed up in Ames to vote for Pat) and Buchanan sees himself getting at least one-third of the vote under this scenario.

Can he be stopped by the Ventura forces? Will Perot let Buchanan step into his shoes? No and yes are the quick answers. Ventura has not hidden his dislike of Buchanan’s right-wing politics (though he, like everyone else in this country, seems to have decided that there’s no need to go into the repulsive details), going so far as to call him a “retread” who couldn’t win his own party’s nomination.

But Ventura, and all the other self-proclaimed centrists in the Reform Party, can’t prevent Buchanan from winning the party’s nomination without a stronger candidate who can beat him. And none is in sight.

Lowell Weicker spent much of the summer ruminating about running while noting publicly that he disagreed with many Reformers on such issues as free trade (he’s for it), term limits (against) and guns (he’d ban them).

He’s lousy on campaign finance reform, another concern close to Reformers’ hearts, because of a mistaken belief that it can’t be done without tampering with the First Amendment. It’s not for nothing that one top Ventura operative told me in August that Weicker’s “not doing anything to make me think he’d be a strong candidate for the Reform Party.”

Then there’s Donald Trump, the latest name being floated by Ventura. “He’s like me,” Ventura told the Washington paper the Hill last week. “He offers us a very successful businessman who knows how to do business. He also offers us an out-of-the-box character like me who can paint these other two candidates with the same brush I did. I think he’s a dynamic speaker.”

But Trump is a major wheeler-dealer who, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, has since 1995 given more than $250,000 in campaign contributions, including $181,500 in soft money, to a bipartisan array of Democratic and Republican lawmakers and candidates ranging from Republicans Steve Forbes, Bob Dole and Al D’Amato to Democrats Ted Kennedy, Charles Rangel and John Kerry. It’s hard to see how Trump could really meet the standards of an “out-of-the-box” insurgent like Ventura. Fat cats like Trump built the box Ventura and his allies are trying to escape.

Ventura’s control of the Reform Party also should not be overstated. The fact that he helped elect the party’s new chairman, Jack Gargan of Florida, at the July convention in Michigan means less than it appeared to at first, since Gargan doesn’t formally take over till Jan. 1. In the days after the convention, outgoing chairman Russ Verney — a Perot loyalist through and through — gave assurances to Gargan that he was ready and willing to step down as early as Sept. 1.

But then he issued an ultimatum: Gargan must publicly endorse the party’s nomination rules as they now stand before Verney would surrender his post. Under the current rules, supported by Verney and Perot, the party’s candidate will be selected by a mail ballot starting next July and culminating at the August convention. Potential nominees have to be working to qualify as an independent candidate in enough states to win a hypothetical majority of electoral votes. Ballots will then be mailed to people who sign their petitions, as well as anyone else who requests one.

This process in effect makes the Reform Party a party for rent. Anyone with a strong grass-roots base and/or deep-pocketed backers can try to take it over. As matters now stand, the Democratic and Republican nominees could each flood the Reformers’ “national primary” with mischief-making voters seeking to nominate whatever candidate might hurt their opponent most.

Gargan refused Verney’s demand, in part because he is worried that the process could put the party “at grave risk of bankruptcy should outside forces mobilize to take [it] over.” (For starters, they are going to have to come up with millions of dollars to pay for the mail-in balloting process.) So he won’t be taking the reins until next year, when it will be too late, under the party’s constitution, to make any changes in the process.

There are also many signs that Ventura’s chief rival, Perot, is ready to pass the torch to Buchanan. His 1996 vice presidential candidate, Pat Choate, has been loudly beating the drums for Buchanan, with Perot’s evident approval. And despite Perot’s moderate views on abortion, in his personal and business life he is much closer to Buchanan’s uptight views than Ventura’s libertine ways.

Though no one can say for sure what the temperamental Texan will do, it’s also worth noting that he has good reason to stay focused on his business. Last I checked, Perot Systems stock had dropped to around $20 a share, after an IPO in February that went from $16 to a high of $85.75.

So, with Buchanan the clear front-runner for the Reform nomination, what does this all mean?

I don’t buy the current theory that this spells Bush’s doom, though the parallels to 1992 — when Buchanan wounded Bush’s father in the primaries, and then Perot helped do him in in the debates — are real. But while current polls do show Buchanan drawing more from the Republican column than the Democrats, scoring as high as 16 percent in one survey that asked about a three-way race between him, Bush and Gore, so far Buchanan has spent nearly all of his time targeting the Republican base. If he moves to the Reform Party, that will change.

Few recall that in the 1996 primaries, he started drawing big crowds — and votes — from union halls in the Rust Belt. Buchanan’s vote totals in labor strongholds like Racine, Wis., and Dubuque, Iowa, jumped dramatically between his 1992 and 1996 campaigns.

For example, in 1996 he got 8,604 votes in Racine, a blue-collar industrial city south of Milwaukee, compared to just 2,654 in 1992. The difference: in 1992 Buchanan ran primarily as a hardcore social conservative with a nativist, even racist, tinge; in 1996 he had added a broad critique of corporate greed and footloose capital that was pitched directly at workers displaced by the amoral forces of globalization.

He even told John Nichols of the Capitol Times in Madison at the end of that run that he would have enjoyed the opportunity to run in the Democratic primaries that year.

Buchanan’s bolt will be a challenge to both Bush and Gore, therefore. It will give Bush a chance to show that he really is a different, more compassionate, breed of Republican — one who won’t make nice with a racist demagogue. And it will give Gore a reason to aim his campaign less at suburban, moderate women and more at the working-class majority that used to be the Democrats’ loyal base.

Can a third party be built on an alliance of hardcore social conservatives and disaffected blue-collar unionists? Yes. In some cases — think pro-labor, pro-life Democrats like David Bonior and Marcy Kaptur — no huge leap is required.

Of course, what happens to the economy over the next year will determine how big Buchanan’s campaign will get. But to the extent that Pat gets a free ride on his past record of hate speech, and no one else emerges to speak for the people most hurt by globalization and corporate greed and irresponsibility, comparisons to Le Pen in France and Peron in Argentina will soon be in order — if not eclipsed by his likely successes here.

There are still a couple of possible silver linings, however. One is that a Buchanan third-party run will force more attention to third parties in general, as it becomes clearer to even the corporate-owned media that the public wants more choices than Bland A and Bland B.

And finally, with Buchanan seemingly hurting Bush more than Gore (or Bill Bradley), his candidacy may liberate someone like Ralph Nader, or perhaps Warren Beatty, who might otherwise be worrying about hurting the Democratic candidate, to run hard as a progressive populist on the left. Strange and surprising things are already happening in this election — maybe even more are just around the corner.

In fact, even though virtually every Republican presidential candidate kissed Trump’s ring, it’s further down the ballot where he has had the biggest financial impact. He gave $5,000 to Connecticut GOP Senate nominee Linda McMahon last year and $30,800 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the campaign arm of Senate Republicans, which did not return a request for comment.

On the House side, he gave $2,500 to Rep. Ed Royce’s, R-Cal., reelection effort; another $1,000 to Tea Party favorite Rep. Allen West, R-Fla.; and $2,000 to Rep. Peter King, R-NY. And while he’s given to Democrats in the past, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, all of Trump’s donations in this year’s election cycle were to Republicans, including Romney ($2,500) and disgraced former New York Rep. Chris Lee, who resigned after being caught looking for sex on Craigslist. (Trump gave $500, which appears to have been returned.)

Trump has been especially involved with West, whose campaign did not return a request for comment. The “Apprentice” star appeared with the congressman at a Tea Party rally in Florida last April, and West even said he was open to being Trump’s vice presidential pick if the real estate mogul somehow won the GOP nomination. West told Newsmax at the time that he hoped Trump was “very serious” about his presidential bid. West also accepted $2,500 from Joseph Farah, the birther editor of World Net Daily, in 2008. (It’s Farah’s only political donation the past three cycles.)

But perhaps no candidate has closer or deeper ties to Trump than McMahon, who also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. McMahon made her money through the WWE professional wrestling league, which her husband founded.

Trump has been involved in the sport for years, which suits his flamboyant and phony image. Wrestlemania IV and V were both held at Trump Plaza, and a video that made the rounds on Twitter yesterday shows Trump tackling Vince McMahon at Wrestlemania 23. Trump and two beefy wrestlers hold down and restrain McMahon before shaving his head to wild cheers from the packed arena.

Trump’s ties to Linda McMahon became a campaign issue earlier this year when Democrat Chris Murphy slammed his opponent for taking Trump’s money. “That’s right, the man who led the charge to see President Obama’s birth certificate, report cards and test scores has set his sights on Connecticut’s Senate seat,” Murphy campaign manager Kenny Curran said in a fundraising email to supporters in February. The Connecticut Democratic Party even cut a web ad attacking McMahon that featured Trump.

The piece is largely an attempt to add a patina of respectability to the ancient, brainless comment thread talking point about how Robert Byrd was in the Klan, but lots of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act, so therefore Democrats are the real racists. (In this respect, the piece is an homage to Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism,” which attempted to expand “Nazi stands for National Socialist” to book length, without pictures.) The only problem is that the “lie” he’s arguing against is 100 percent true, except when he states it in such a way that it no longer resembles what anyone has ever actually claimed.

So: It’s true, and no one denies this, that Republicans used to be very good on civil rights and Democrats used to be super racist. It’s true that Woodrow Wilson was a bigot and (Northern, liberal) Republican senators were better than (Southern, conservative) Democratic senators on civil rights in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Williamson’s argument seems to be that Republicans couldn’t have taken advantage of a Democratic split over civil rights by appealing to racist white Southern voters because Republicans were too uniformly pro-civil rights, themselves. (This great big lie he’s debunking is one that Nixon and Lee Atwater and Ronald Reagan happily signed on to — they were thrilled when the Democrats fractured the New Deal coalition by eventually embracing civil rights!)

Williamson would, I guess, call it revisionist history, but he has revised all of the history out of it.

Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there. That is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century.

Oh, did they? It’s dubious to argue that the party that nominated Barry Goldwater for president was “far more enlightened” than the one that nominated Kennedy, but Johnson was a big ol’ Texas racist, so sure, fine, pretend Nelson Rockefeller cancels out Barry. But the segregationists didn’t all wake up and decide to vote for Republicans starting in 1965 — they revolted. George Wallace started a third party. They continued fighting for racism within the party, and they eventually lost. But it wasn’t until the conservative movement had finished fully taking over the Republican Party that the great shift finished.

After devoting a lot of words to LBJ’s very real history of being a loud-mouthed racist, Williamson explains that Johnson’s dumb, loud-mouthed racism was just a reflection of the whole of Democratic Party philosophy and belief since time immemorial.

Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex nihilo. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth Amendment. Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Eisenhower, as a general, began the process of desegregating the military, and Truman, as president, formalized it, but the main reason either had to act was that President Wilson, the personification of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously integrated federal facilities. (“If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.) Klansmen from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black held prominent positions in the Democratic Party — and President Wilson chose the Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White House.

Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at civil-rights reform as the “nigger bill.” So what happened in 1964 to change Democrats’ minds? In fact, nothing.

What is the funniest part of this: How it basically makes one brief stop in between 1875 and the mid-20th century in its exhaustive history of Democratic racism? Or how Williamson is clearly annoyed at having to even slightly, obliquely credit Harry Truman (Democrat!) for desegregating the armed forces, a thing (Democrat) Harry Truman did? Like, maybe what happened in 1964 was the eventual result of an intraparty battle that was happening in 1948 when Democrat Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces (and Strom Thurmond, future Republican, threw a big fit about it)?

The 1964 Civil Rights Act, and Lyndon Johnson’s role in ensuring its passage, was one major victory in a years-long effort by the party’s liberals to make the Democratic Party the civil rights party, and it worked so well that the racists were effectively no longer welcome. They responded by changing their positions or changing sides. It wasn’t an overnight change, because politics is slow, but it happened: Robert Byrd and even George Wallace changed their positions on black civil rights and apologized. Those who couldn’t adapt, or those for whom bigotry was more genuine belief than political opportunism, left the party. Strom Thurmond became a Republican. Lester Maddox launched a third-party presidential bid against Jimmy Carter and eventually endorsed Republican Pat Buchanan in 1992. Maddox was also a charter member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the white supremacist paleoconservative group that once counted Trent Lott, Thurmond and Jesse Helms as members. These guys are the heirs to the conservative white Southern Democrat tradition. I’m not really sure they themselves would consider it a pernicious lie to say as much.

What would have been much, much more entertaining would have been if, instead of writing this piece about “Democrats” and “Republicans,” Williamson had written it about liberals and conservatives. Barry Goldwater and George Wallace both used conservative rhetoric to justify their segregationist beliefs — and so did William F. Buckley. Both parties at the time had liberal and conservative wings, and in each of those parties it was the liberal wing that was right on civil rights.

There was really only one American political party with a solid record on civil rights in the first half of the 20th century, and it was the American Communist Party. But “in praise of the liberal Northeastern Republicans who stood with the communists on civil rights and who were eventually driven from the party by conservatives like the ones who founded this magazine” would not go over well in the National Review, I imagine.

Williamson goes on to argue that the white South didn’t go Republican because of civil rights, it went Republican because of … the New Deal. So while the change happened too slowly and gradually to be ascribed to racism, it can happily be pinned on a series of popular economic programs that had been enacted 30 years prior to 1964. (Programs so popular that Southern racists and blacks joined together in a political coalition that lasted until liberals began … winning civil rights victories.)

But let’s not also forget to blame hippies and welfare:

The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic Party. Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican Party.

In other words, it was literally everything that was going on in the 1960s besides civil rights issues that made white Southerners eventually fully embrace the Republican Party. (And blacks continue to support the Democrats because Democrats lied about what happened in the 1960s and because Johnson promised them free government money forever, apparently.)

I mean it’s obviously true that the shift didn’t happen purely because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but it’s just as obviously true that it’s a hilarious and deeply stupid misreading of history to pretend that the Republican Party has always and will always be the champion of civil rights.

[Thanks to, and please also read: Adam Serwer, Jonathan Chait, Mark Schmitt, Clay Risen, and Jonathan Bernstein.]

For those of us who believe that there’s something seriously wrong with the Republican Party (and see Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein’s new book; see also my argument that the problem is not about how “conservative” they are, but about their radical style), the big question is whether anything can be done about it. American democracy needs two strong, solid political parties, but currently one of the parties is just a mess – incapable of making coherent policy when it’s in office, and dangerously obstructionist when it’s out of office.

So how can a party recover? I think there are three ways, but two are unfortunately quite unlikely, and the third is at best uncertain.

Some talk about the possibility that the electorate will punish Republicans for their radicalism. Unfortunately, I think that’s unlikely. Note that consecutive blowouts in 2006 and 2008 certainly didn’t make things better. Part of the problem here, too, is that elections generally don’t work that way. It’s true that the impression of ideological extremism can be costly, as Barry Goldwater and George McGovern learned the hard way, but we’re talking here about 2 or 3 percentage points in a presidential election. Direct action by the voters just isn’t enough to do it. After all, as voters, they can only choose between the nominees that they’ve been offered, and if anything voters are more partisan than ever; they’re not likely to defect just because a candidate embraces the crazy, even if they don’t like it, because they would still have a strong preference for that candidate otherwise.

A second possibility is that they’ll wind up with a successful president who sets a strong example of sane conservativism and who is strong enough within the party that he or she can push a lot of the crazies to the fringes and beyond. That could work. Presidents have limited influence in general, but one thing that a popular president can do is to define normality for his or her own party. They can reward some and punish — or at least avoid rewarding — others, creating real and meaningful incentives that can be very different from what came before. The obvious analogy is Dwight Eisenhower’s maneuverings against Joe McCarthy. The problem is that for this strategy to work it takes a skilled and popular president who decides to try it, but Republicans might have to wait a long time before they get another Ike.

So the first method probably can’t work, and the second one is unlikely to happen. That leaves one other possibility: that the Republican coalition itself might demand change. Specifically, that Republican-aligned interest groups – perhaps business, national security or others – might become upset enough with the crazy, or worried enough that the crazy will impede their ability to get things done, that they’ll push to end it. After all, part of the problem with the crazy is that it truly is random; you really never know what nonsense Limbaugh or the Breitbart sites are going to be up to next, and there’s every possibility that it could interfere with groups within the party pursuing their interests. Even worse: Politicians who believe they were elected because their most valuable allies convinced the electorate that the president was a radicalized foreigner are going to be responsive to those supporters, and not to organized party groups. Those groups have enough troubles as it is, since in the current free-for-all campaign finance environment they have to compete with random billionaires who might have all sorts of unorthodox policy preferences.

We’ve seen a little bit of this already. During the healthcare debate, many normally Republican-leaning groups chose to work with the Obama administration and cut their best deal, rather than sticking with the rejectionist GOP. Several companies quit the conservative state lobbying organization ALEC when it became controversial by lobbying for ideological and partisan goals. On the national security side, a break has emerged between the Department of Defense and movement conservatives; both conservatives who care about national security and (on some issues) businesses might choose to stick with the Pentagon. And it’s not quite the same thing, but there’s been a small but steady stream of defectors from the movement.

Nevertheless, something like this would likely play out in nomination politics, with party-aligned groups insisting on candidates who are willing to fight for their interests while rejecting the crazy, and there certainly isn’t any sign of that yet. Will it in 2014 and 2016 if Romney falls short this fall and the crazy gets even worse? I have no idea – but that’s the only path out of this that I can imagine.

The most recent evidence that the current incarnation of the Republican Party just can’t handle the truth arrived this month when House Republicans voted to get rid of the American Community Survey. The ACS is an annual information-gathering effort that’s part of the U.S. Census. Every year, a randomized sample of 3 million Americans is surveyed for data on “demographic, housing, social and economic characteristics.” In one form or another, the U.S. government has been carrying out similar surveys since 1850 — the current version is the fourth major iteration.

Most sensible people consider the ACS to be extremely useful, the kind of thing that government is really well equipped to carry out. That is not, or at least did not used to be, a partisan statement. Both private and public sector policymakers use ACS data to make important decisions. The federal government allocates $450 billion annually according, in part, to information derived from the ACS. Businesses also consider the ACS vital, which explains why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, rarely a fan of government spending, is opposed to the House action.

Even conservative economists are leery: The clearest evidence that the House GOP has gone completely beyond the pale can be seen in a Businessweek article reporting that representatives of the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute all declared their support for government data gathering. If you don’t understand what’s going on in the U.S. economy on a granular level, you’re flying blind. This should not be a controversial statement.

Even the Wall Street Journal is appalled — although the lead sentence of its editorial criticizing the funding cuts required some remarkable calisthenics before reaching the point of disapproval.

With the contempt of the Washington establishment raining down on House Republicans for voting on principle, every now and then the GOP does something that feeds the otherwise false narrative of political extremism.

Marvelous! In one sentence, the Journal’s editorial writer manages to deny, not once, but twice, the self-evident fact that the current crop of House Republicans occupies the nethermost regions of right-wing extremism, while at the same time admitting that, yeah, well, in this one case they are indeed bonkers.

There’s been no end of media chatter focusing on the importance of the data gathered by the ACS. We’ve also heard how the Constitution specifically enjoins Congress to gather demographic information “in such a manner as they shall by law direct.” And, in fact, the current form of the ACS follows the mandate set forth by a Republican Congress in 2005.

The sponsor of the House measure, the freshman Florida Republican Daniel Webster, claims that ACS questions are too “intrusive” and “the very picture of what’s wrong in D.C.” He seems to be projecting. The very picture of what’s wrong with D.C. is exquisitely captured by daily demonstration that one of our leading political parties is dedicated to the proposition that the less we know about what is going on in our economy or on our planet, the better. If science tells us that one of the consequences of human activity is an overheated planet, then the answer is to defund climate research. If data gathered by the ACS gives us a better understanding of where poverty may be growing as a result of economic policies put into place over the past few decades, best to just to close our eyes and ignore it.

Which brings us back to the 17th century. It’s no stretch to argue that both representative democracy and the Industrial Revolution flourished in large part through the application of Enlightenment principles. The founders of the United States were very much a product of Enlightenment ideals. Looking for an Enlightenment avatar? Think Ben Franklin. Progress is built on the accumulation of knowledge, and ideological rigidity shouldn’t be able to compete against the truth that derives from a better understanding of our universe. And yet that’s where we are today — watching as one of the two major political parties in our country becomes not just more and more distrustful of science, but also opposed to the very notion of information-gathering — and governs accordingly.

At the same time, Colorado’s Republican House Speaker Frank McNulty twice blocked a vote on a bill to legalize civil unions. His rationale? “We should not be spending time on divisive social issues when unemployment remains far too high and [when] far too many Coloradans remain out of work,” he said. Echoing that sentiment, the shadowy Republican front group Compass Colorado financed an automated telephone call telling thousands of voters that the push for civil unions was unacceptable because it is “promoting [a] divisive social agenda over Colorado job creation.”

Obviously, it’s perplexing to see the Republican Party allege that social issues are insignificant and “divisive.” This is, after all, the party whose most recent presidential nominating contest was dominated by attacks on contraception — the same GOP whose politicians have made an art out of riding a “guns, god and gays”-focused agenda to electoral victory.

But while such naked hypocrisy is enraging, the substance of the Republican rhetoric about gay rights is downright offensive. Essentially, conservatives are asserting that we cannot extend equal rights to all Americans and fix the economy. In the process, they are deliberately insinuating that the twin goals are somehow contradictory.

Well, you might ask, do they have a point? History says no. Our country’s story is the story of multitasking — a tale of extending the franchise to women while passing progressive legislation to deal with crushing economic inequality, a tale of both passing civil rights legislation and creating Medicare.

In light of such achievements, would anyone retroactively argue that America should have opposed the campaign to let women vote because the economy was so bad in the early 20th century? Would anyone insist that lawmakers should have halted civil rights legislation in the 1960s because there was a simultaneous need for a War on Poverty? Probably not, because most of us recognize such arguments for what they are: diversionary non sequiturs whose real goal is to preserve institutional bigotry and prejudice.

That’s the same objective of today’s GOP when it comes to rights for same-sex couples. For proof, just consider the abruptness of the shift: the Republican Party that spent the last decade insisting that we should simultaneously cut taxes, prosecute foreign wars and fight to limit a woman’s right to choose an abortion now suddenly says we can’t even discuss equal rights because of a recession.

The language changed not because the new “can’t walk and chew gum” mantra makes sense (seriously — would any sane person really claim that a bad economy justifies continued persecution of lesbians, gay, bisexual and transgender people?). It changed because the cause of equal rights is involved. And, clearly, that cause is what today’s Republicans are now most committed to stopping — no matter how much their flawed logic indicts their credibility.