So the local and national Ryan headlines have made for a surreal contrast: The former governor could win the Nobel Peace Prize for his death penalty stand — he’s been nominated already –or he could go to jail for corruption. Or both.

Before leaving office, Ryan padded the state payroll with cronies. Meanwhile, 52 of his former employees have been convicted and another 20 aides have reportedly been subpoenaed in connection with the federal Operation Safe Road investigation. Operation Safe Road was prompted by a bribery scandal in which nine people were killed by truckers who illegally obtained driver’s licenses from Ryan’s employees when he was Illinois’ secretary of state in the 1990s. Some of that bribe money found its way into his campaign fund. The investigation has uncovered a system that pressured managers at driver’s license facilities to sell tickets to Ryan’s political fundraisers. The biggest producers were rewarded with promotions, and, prosecutors say, the process encouraged the selling of licenses for bribes.

On Tuesday, less than 24 hours after Ryan’s official departure from the Governor’s Mansion, his former chief of staff and head of his campaign committee, Scott Fawell, faced a variety of charges in federal court, ranging from racketeering to the use of taxpayer dollars for campaign work to accepting a free trip to Costa Rica that included prostitutes. Fawell and Citizens for Ryan are also charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice. Within the last few weeks, newspaper stories have claimed the feds are still secretly taping phone calls made to Ryan.

Public opinion is generally against the former governor, no matter how people feel about the death penalty. A recent poll showed 60 percent of Illinoisans have an unfavorable opinion of him. Some were surprised the poll was so positive: Callers to one talk-radio show in downstate Springfield, the state capital, overwhelmingly agreed that Ryan should have been taken away in handcuffs during the inauguration ceremony of his successor, Democrat Rod Blagojevich. Monday’s Chicago Sun-Times prominently displayed the grief and fury of families whose loved ones died at the hands of murderers now facing life in prison rather than death sentences.

Page 1 of the tabloid even featured an angry quote by an outraged Joseph Birkett, the DuPage County prosecutor who relentlessly pursued the exonerated death row inmate Rolando Cruz when all evidence pointed to another man. During Cruz’s second murder trial, Birkett ignored the confession of another inmate. When DNA evidence pointed the finger directly at that inmate, Birkett still forced Cruz to endure a third capital trial, which ended, finally, in acquittal. Cruz was eventually released from death row in 1995, after proclaiming his innocence for more than a decade.

Despite a flood of similar stories in recent years, most people here continue to attribute Ryan’s commutation of the 167 death sentences to a concern over his historical reputation, not a stand on principle. But that doesn’t make much sense. If a politician were truly concerned with his legacy, why would he take such an unpopular step? And with federal investigators hot on his trail, why would he do something that was sure to anger law enforcement authorities?

In the movie “Bulworth,” Warren Beatty portrays a veteran politician who has a nervous breakdown and hires a contract killer to assassinate him. In the short time he has left to live, he discovers he’s finally free to say and do what he truly believes.

After deciding to not seek reelection midway through his first term, Ryan increasingly did whatever he pleased — legacy be damned. He lashed out at the press. He traveled to Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro. He slammed his party’s nominee for governor (after the candidate claimed to lag in the polls simply because his name was also Ryan). He behaved as though he were the only man who could afford to tell the truth — the man with nothing left to lose. It’s one of the most remarkable — and, yes, courageous — national political stories in years, maybe decades.

Some people come to politics after making their fortunes. Others work their way up the ranks, cultivating friends in high places. George Ryan did the first — rising in politics while making his fortune — by concentrating on the second. Ryan is from Kankakee County. The county’s main city, Kankakee, is only 50 miles south of Chicago, but it is in no way a suburb. Its surroundings are largely rural, and the city stands on its own. While Chicago has long been run by a powerful Democratic political machine, the organization in Kankakee is strictly Republican. At the time Ryan first entered politics, Kankakee’s boss was a state senator named Ed McBroom.

Political columnist Rich Miller is a Kankakee native whose Web site, capitolfax.com, follows events in the Illinois statehouse. “When I was a kid,” Miller says, “in order to get a job with the county you had to buy a car from a dealership owned by Ed McBroom, who was also the Republican Party chairman.”

George Ryan’s father had a pair of pharmacies. Upon returning from the Korean War, Ryan went to work in the family business and married a high school sweetheart, Lura Lynn. He later graduated with a pharmacy degree from Ferris State College in Big Rapids, Mich. In 1962, Ryan became McBroom’s campaign manager, and McBroom subsequently helped Ryan’s brother, Tom, get elected mayor of the city of Kankakee. The Ryan brothers learned how to wield influence from a master: McBroom doled out contracts and favors only to those who were willing to pay tribute.

With a nod from McBroom, Ryan got appointed to the Kankakee County Board in 1966. He was elected two years later. “Ryan became the county board chairman, and his brother was mayor,” Miller says. “Gradually they got a lock on power.” The family pharmacies boomed, selling prescription drugs to nursing homes, which increasingly became a lucrative government-contract business. With another boost from McBroom, Ryan got elected to the Illinois House in 1972.

“He was clearly a typical, pro-business conservative Republican,” says Bernard Schoenburg, political columnist for the State Journal-Register in Springfield.

Five years later, at the age of 42, Ryan was elected minority leader of the Illinois House, in a contest that pitted Chicago suburbanites against Ryan’s downstate conservatives. Ryan voted to re-establish the death penalty. “It was a tough vote,” he admitted in a 1977 interview with the public-policy magazine Illinois Issues. “It bothered me for a couple of days after I did it, but I believe that reinstating the death penalty will have an effect. We’ve tried everything else … I think the state should have the death penalty for a while and see what happens. It may be easy to talk about the death penalty, but it’s a different matter to push the button to vote yes. To vote for a bill like that, I had to think about it very hard, and I was upset about it that whole day. But I feel that I did the right thing.”

Ryan became speaker of the Illinois House after Republicans regained a majority in the 1980 election. The state was at the center of the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment. After 10 years, ERA proponents had 35 of the 38 states needed to ratify the addition to the U.S. Constitution. Protesters nationwide had descended on Springfield.

“A group of women in chains fasted every day in the Capitol rotunda, sometimes joined by Dick Gregory,” Schoenburg recalls. “Ryan was not a fan of ERA.” The National Organization for Women put Ryan on its “Dirty Dozen” list.

In what some claim was an inappropriate application of legislative rules, Ryan killed the ERA’s chances in Illinois by refusing to allow the House to pass it with a simple majority. Instead he required passage by a three-fifths majority.

Yet today, Ryan isn’t remembered as an ideologue. He was a true old-school politician, always ready to cut a deal with his rivals (if they were willing to deal with him). Helen Satterthwaite, a former Democratic state representative from Urbana, opposed Ryan on the ERA, but she remembers him as “a consummate deal-maker … a man who appreciated the political process in the extreme.”

In 1982, in what became the closest race in Illinois history, Republican Gov. James “Big Jim” Thompson barely beat back a challenge from Democrat Adlai Stevenson III. As a sop to the right wing, Thompson had picked Ryan as his lieutenant governor. But Ryan had always seemed to maintain conservative positions on key issues more as a matter of political pragmatism. Under the moderate Thompson, he could afford to veer a bit publicly to the middle of the road. Eight years later he was elected secretary of state, where he proved adept at using the office for self-promotion. There his troubles began.

Whether the misdeeds were his own or arose from the actions of his trusted advisors, it’s obvious the feds are currently thinking about indicting Ryan. At the start of Fawell’s trial, one prosecutor blamed the Ryan “machine,” which sacrificed “the public good on the altar of personal and political greed.” While Operation Safe Road began as an investigation into the selling of Ryan fundraising tickets, the government is now alleging that Ryan’s aides — and perhaps Ryan himself — profited personally from a pattern of influence peddling. The former governor hasn’t been charged with a crime, but prosecutors have already alleged Ryan knew that documents were being shredded, that employees did political work on state time, and that his own Jamaican vacation had been paid for by someone who did business with the state.

Said U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald: “For the better part of a decade in Illinois, when it came to contracts and leases in the secretary of state’s office, the fix was in for a price.”

On Nov. 8, 1994, Ryan was reelected secretary of state. That same evening, on an interstate highway, a mudflap flew off of a semi driven by a trucker named Ricardo Guzman, who obtained his driver’s license by bribing someone at the Illinois Office of the Secretary of State. The mudflap hit the gas tank of a minivan driven by the Rev. Duane Willis. The minivan burst into flames. Willis and his wife, Janet, escaped, but their six children were killed.

The Operation Safe Road investigation was announced in October 1998, less than a month before Ryan was elected governor. At the time, prosecutors said Ryan was not the subject of the probe. That’s obviously changed.

In his race for governor, Ryan squeaked past Glenn Poshard, a conservative Democrat who had been abandoned by many in his party. Ryan handled the campaign skillfully, at times looking like a progressive without giving up his bedrock conservative positions. He maintained his stance against abortion, but picked a pro-choice woman as his running mate. He courted the gay vote by making vague promises to pass anti-discrimination laws. He was everybody’s friend, and powerful Democrats seemed to back off because they thought they could work with Ryan.

In his inaugural address, Ryan acknowledged that many saw him as “a deal-maker without principle.” But, he replied, “compromise is not a bad word.”

In a December 2000 speech to Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, Ryan recalled this point in his career. His popularity had plummeted with every new revelation and indictment in the Operation Safe Road scandal. But he was faced with a larger problem.

“Back in the fall of 1998, when I was still campaigning for governor, Anthony Porter was scheduled to be executed on Sept. 23 of that year. He had ordered his last meal and been fitted for his burial clothes. Mr. Porter had been convicted in the 1982 shooting death of a man and woman in a South Side Chicago park. Two days before he was to die, his lawyers won a last-minute reprieve based on his IQ.”

That’s when Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess and a handful of his students investigated Porter’s case and exonerated him. The real killer confessed.

“After spending 17 years on death row, [Porter] was a freed man,” Ryan said. “By then I had just been inaugurated as governor … Frankly, I was caught off-guard. I didn’t know how bad our system really was. I couldn’t believe the system that I had believed in could come that close to executing an innocent man.”

Soon thereafter, a man named Andrew Kokoraleis was executed for the rape, mutilation and murder of a 21-year-old woman. Ryan had played at politics for decades, but this was an entirely different matter. He took his responsibility seriously. “I double-checked and then I triple-checked,” he recalled in the same speech. “I wanted to be absolutely sure that this man was guilty.” Though he was convinced of Koukoraleis’s guilt, and allowed the execution to go forward, Ryan was left shaken by the “emotional, exhausting experience.”

Chicago newspapers began to print a procession of stories about wrongfully convicted prisoners. One particular series in the Tribune followed cases on death row. In his Northwestern speech, Ryan recalled being startled by the Tribune’s findings.

“Half of the nearly 300 capital cases in Illinois had been reversed for a new trial or sentencing hearing. Thirty-three of the death row inmates were represented at trial by an attorney who had later been disbarred or at some point suspended from the practice of law.

“I’m a pharmacist from Kankakee. I got to tell you, I don’t know how that happens. I don’t know how you can put a person up to die, charge them with a crime that can take their life, and be represented by an unqualified attorney. I don’t understand that at all.” Since reinstating the death penalty in 1977, Illinois had executed 12. But in January 1999, it was forced to release its 13th innocent captive from death row. That was a “shameful scorecard,” Ryan said. “I couldn’t live with myself knowing I might put an innocent person to death.”

On Jan. 31, 1999, he declared a moratorium on the death penalty. Two months later he pulled together a commission of experts to study the system — and to see whether it could be fixed. The problems were many: coerced confessions and eyewitness accounts, cases based purely on the testimony of jailhouse snitches. DNA had become a powerful tool in exonerating the wrongfully convicted, but in the majority of murders there is no DNA evidence.

Ryan could see it was a problem that extended to all facets of law enforcement. “I’m not only concerned about the death penalty,” he said in a speech delivered in late 2000. “I’m concerned about the whole criminal code we have in Illinois. There is without question a lot of people sitting in prisons today that didn’t commit the crimes they are there for. They may not be facing the death penalty, but we’ve shortened their lives by putting them in prison for a crime they didn’t commit.”

Taking this stance didn’t win Ryan many friends, despite what his critics are now saying. With the ongoing federal investigation into abuses during his two terms as Illinois secretary of state, Ryan became a pariah to his party. He hadn’t been helped by a “humanitarian” trip he made to Cuba in 1999, or by his more recent comments that he “couldn’t throw the switch on this guy, [Oklahoma City bomber Timothy] McVeigh, and he was a terrible guy.”

His traditional conservative constituency turned on him, and the top members of his party encouraged him to not seek another term in office. On Aug. 5, 2001, Ryan announced he would step aside to make way for another candidate.

He still had nearly a year and a half in office, and he remained committed to fixing the death-penalty system. He took the recommendations of his commission and crafted several legislative reform packages. He sent these to the Illinois General Assembly, which refused to act.

As he prepared to leave office, Ryan let it be known that he might commute every sentence on death row. Last October the Illinois Prisoner Review Board met in Chicago and Springfield to hear petitions from almost every prisoner on death row. (Some refrained from petitioning for commutation because they didn’t want to lose their rights to new trials.) Death-penalty opponents hoped the hearings would provide an important forum, but the hearings were soon overshadowed by prosecutors, who featured the emotional testimonies of victims’ families. Ryan later met individually with these families, and, as recently as December, he said he would probably issue commutations on a case-by-case basis.

Almost to the end, Ryan said he hoped the system could be fixed, that the General Assembly would enact at least some of his reforms. But it didn’t. Asked last Saturday whether he still would have issued his blanket commutation if the reforms had passed, he said: “Maybe not. I don’t know.”

Ryan has received plenty of praise for his stand against the death penalty. Just as scandal had turned him into an outcast in Illinois political circles, he became a hit on the lecture circuit. A professor at the University of Illinois has offered to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize. Getting nominated for the Nobel Prize is a long way from winning it (imagine an actor bragging that he once auditioned for Hamlet), but the idea has shocked many Illinoisans who consider Ryan to be nothing more than a hack politician. Which he was — until last weekend.

Still, this hasn’t stopped talk that the commutation was self-serving. While most cite concern over his legacy, “I thought he did it for protection in prison,” quipped Ben Joravsky, a columnist at the alternative Chicago Reader. Most are betting that Ryan will soon face a federal indictment under Operation Safe Road.

Powerful figures who suddenly face prosecution often get a renewed appreciation for civil liberties, and those whose reputations have been destroyed usually seek redemption. But if commuting all death sentences handed down by a monumentally flawed system is the right thing to do, it doesn’t matter what Ryan’s motivations were. Innocent men and women might have been put to death, and he stopped it from happening.

Outside the auditorium after Saturday’s blanket-commutation speech, Anthony Porter stood meekly in the crowded hallway. The first death row inmate exonerated during Ryan’s administration was asked what he was doing with his freedom. Dressed in a yellow and lime green suit, Porter could only shrug and smile. “Life is wonderful,” he said.

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.