Jon Lovett can be uneven, but he has some magical flashes, like this one:

It happened slowly, didn’t it? The change in the Republican Party? I don’t know. Maybe it’s nostalgia. There have always been the wild, vicious voices of the right. The devil on the shoulder of the conservative movement that whispers in its ear, “burn it down, burn it down.” But those voices were to be ignored, humored, tolerated, placated, or just deceived. That was the way of things, and we were protected by the obvious: people who believe foolish things tend to be easy to fool.

Then it all changed. The Republican elite caught a ride on the tiger. But the tiger got sick of waiting for the gazelles it was promised, the gazelles that were always one election away. The tiger was hungry and angry and tired of being used and the longer it waited the more appetizing the elite on its back became. So the tiger got a radio station and a news channel. The tiger got organized and mobilized. And finally the tiger realized it didn’t need someone kicking its sides telling it which way to run and who to eat and when to eat and why it wasn’t time to eat and the time to eat would come, don’t worry, you’ll eat soon enough.

So the tiger ate its master and now here we are.

I love the writing here. But I don’t really think of it as a slow, almost imperceptible process. Certainly, you can trace the long, slow progress from Goldwater to Gohmert. But there have been sudden tectonic slips that have jolted the crazy forward.

I think one of the less appreciated legacies of the Bush administration is that they made Republican ideology incoherent. One moment the GOP was calling for the liquidation of the Department of Education and planning to let Medicare “wither on the vine,” and the next moment they were giving us No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D. One moment they were closing down the government because they wanted spending cuts, and the next moment the vice-president was telling us that Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter. One moment Bush was campaigning on a more humble foreign policy and the next moment, if you weren’t with us, you were against us. The Bush administration was awful from every perspective you might wish to view it, and that includes the movement conservative’s perspective.

But movement conservatives were nonetheless willing to go along with the Bush administration and defend it with the harshest, coarsest, most vituperative language and rhetoric. As they unlearned logical consistency, they also lost the ability to think clearly. Logic became a kind of threat.

So, that was the first real tectonic slip. The next came in late August and September of 2008 when, first, Sarah Palin was selected as John McCain’s running mate, and then the economy completely collapsed. It became almost immediately clear that Sarah Palin was a colossal moron who had absolutely no business on a presidential ticket. It also became clear that John McCain had no idea how to deal with the financial crisis, as he suspended his campaign, unsuccessfully tried to skip a presidential debate, and called for an emergency meeting at the White House where he had nothing to say.

This forced the conservative movement to defend both McCain and Palin is ways that no sentient human being should ever defend other human beings. I believe the experience caused permanent collective brain damage to the entire Republican community. Arguing that Sarah Palin should be a stroke away from the nuclear football will do that to a brain, and a political party.

The final straw, however, was the decision to oppose every single thing the president tried to do. They turned him into a monster when he was never a monster. He became the Kenyan socialist usurper. That was a decision that Mitch McConnell made before the president was even sworn into office. And the result was that the Republican Party started rejecting their own ideas and labeling them communist plots to destroy the country. At that point, with all the bad habits already ingrained, the party just lost control of its base.

They hadn’t governed according to their “principles,” and they had ramped up the fear of the Democrats to such a height that the base decided that they were facing some existential crisis.

Basically, the big steps were ideological inconsistency followed by epic failure which both required people to defend the indefensible which broke people’s logical brains and respect for the truth which then caused them to respond to manufactured fear with rebellion against their own puppet masters.

Or, you know, the tiger ate the Republican elite.