"The Story of Mainstream Republicans Realizing They Can't Control Tea Party Republicans"

"Because they won’t compromise. You’ve got about 52 members of the Republican conference who are affiliated with the tea party in some official way. That’s a bit less than a quarter of all House Republicans. That’s enough in the House. They refuse to compromise because, to them, compromise is capitulation. If you go back to Hofstadter’s work when he’s talking about when the John Birch Society rode high, he talks about how conservatives would see people who disagree as political opponents, but reactionary conservatives saw them as evil. You can’t capitulate to evil."

At The Washington Post, Ezra Klein interviews Christopher Parker, author of Change They Can't Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America.

And Andrew Sullivan at The Dish considers a new report.