Here’s an interesting theory.

This country is in a world of hurt if the likes of Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry wins the next election. It might be in greater trouble if Barack Obama does.

I don’t think it much matters if it’s Bachmann, Perry, Christie, Paul, or Romney. We’ll be in a world of hurt regardless. If a Republican wins the presidency, they will almost certainly win the Senate, too. And you can forget about retaking the House. If Obama is voted out, the GOP will almost definitely have the trifecta. The only thing left standing that can prevent the final victory of the Republican revolution will be the Senate filibuster, if that even survives.

The chances will be very high that a Republican president will be able to replace one of the liberals on the Supreme Court. You can forget about overturning Citizens United. It’s not unlikely that Roe v. Wade will be overturned. Environmental degradation will be unprecedented. The Justice Department will be politicized again. Our leadership role in the world will be crushed as people finally give up on us. I can’t even list all the ways we will be screwed because I am always surprised by how crazy the Republicans are. But, okay, let’s hear why we’ll be even worse off if the president is reelected.

The genteel, pragmatic Republicanism of the past has been supplanted by a pitchforks and torches mentality, a funhouse mirror distortion of traditional conservatism. Meaning, of course, the tea party.

These are folks who don’t just support the death penalty; they cheer for executions. They don’t just oppose health care reform, they shout “Let him die” to the uninsured individual who faces life-threatening illness. They are the true believers: virulently anti-government, anti-Muslim, anti-gay, anti-science, anti-tax, anti-facts and, most of all, anti the coming demographic changes represented by a dark-skinned president with an African name. They are the people who want “their” country back.

Okay, that didn’t explain it, so I guess we’ll have to keep reading.

You might think Obama’s re-election would solve this, offering as it would stark repudiation of the politics of panic, paranoia and reactionary extremism this ideology represents. The problem is, these folks thrive on repudiation, on a free-floating conviction that they have been done wrong, cheated and mistreated by the tides of history and progress, change and demography. So there is every reason to believe, particularly given the weakness of the economy, that being repudiated in next year’s election would only make them redouble their intensity, confirming them as it would in their own victimhood.

And ask yourself: what form could that redoubling take? How do you up the ante from this? What is the logical next step after two years of screaming, rocks through windows, threats against legislators and rhetoric that could start a fire?

An awful, obvious answer suggests itself. You reject it instinctively. This is, after all, America, not some unstable fledgling democracy.
Then you realize it was not so long ago that a man blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City out of anti-government sentiment not so different from that espoused by the tea party. And you remember how that tragedy exposed an entire network of armed anti-government zealots gathering in the woods. And you read where the Southern Poverty Law Center says the number of radical anti-government groups spiked to 824 in 2010, a 61 percent increase over just the previous year.

And you wonder.

So, even though we’ll be screwed under a Republican administration, we won’t be dead. We should hand the keys to the government over to these lunatics before they start an armed insurrection.

Obviously, this guy is just thinking out loud, not recommending that we unilaterally disarm. But it’s still a form of stinking thinking. It’s not much different than thinking by ignoring our political fights our opponents will melt away. I think our biggest problem is that we’re letting our frustration blind us to the true nature of the opposition. If we lose next year, we don’t get Poppy. We don’t even get Dubya. We get a new country, unlike anything we’ve seen before in our lifetimes. It won’t be a pleasant experience for us, and considering that this new country will be armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, it might not be a pleasant experience for anyone else, either. I can’t think of a single issue facing the country that won’t get immeasurably, radically worse if the Republicans are rewarded for their behavior with victory.