"The short answer is a breakdown in the party's ability to govern itself. It can't think strategically. Even when pressed to do something overwhelmingly likely to end in disaster, as this shutdown looks likely to do for Republicans, the party has no way to stop itself. It stumbles into fights it cannot win, gets mad, and then in its anger lurches into yet another fight that ends in yet another loss."

"Republicans have lost control of the conservative populist forces that helped them ride to congressional victory in 2010. These folks are happy to ruin if they cannot rule. But the real reason the rot of polarisation is setting in is because the rigged system of redistricting has created safe districts where Republican congressmen will only lose their seats if they are challenged from the right in closed partisan primaries... So the GOP congressional leadership is caught in a trap of their own making, without the ability to govern responsibly as they not-so-secretly see fit."