Friedersdorf is guardedly optimistic about tea party activists taking over of the GOP:
Some of them obviously will be corrupted, but while I don’t imagine they’ll be spectacularly better than what we’ve got now, I do think that the way they came to power might make them marginally less corrupted by the power they’ll eventually wield… if only they don’t fall prey to the catastrophic success that Ross Douthat and Ramesh Ponnurru are smartly worrying about.
What they remind me of is the Labour party in the 1980s where a core group of left-wing activists took over the machinery of local parties in response to Thatcher’s victory and dragged the party to the unelectable left. It took over a decade and Tony Blair to repair the damage. These analogies are always faulty, of course. But then I watch Marco Rubio’s response to Larry Kudlow when asked what he’d do to lower unemployment and I realize these people have literally nothing to offer on the concrete problems of the day. Listen to the fumes of calcified, callow ideology:
The Dish 