Saw this over the weekend, one guy writes in saying he’s surprised I didn’t come up with this. No - but I’m happy to pass it along.

This is Frank Rich in the NYT, writing about the race in upstate New York - where it looks like Conservative (not Republican) Party candidate Doug Hoffman is going to win today. It’s a fascinating case because the GOP candidate - endorsed by Newt, Boehner and much of the official GOP - was deemed insufficiently conservative by the likes of Michelle Malkin and Sarah Palin, the leaders of what movement conservatism has become. Into the breach steps Hoffman; as this section of upstate NY has long been a Republican bastion, he will likely beat Democrat Bill Owens.

And in one respect - good for conservatives for saying, this is what we stand for and this is what we demand the party that is supposed to represent us stand for; and if the party doesn’t stand for that, we’ll bolt.

But the bottom line is - what is it they stand for? Resentment, cultural puritanism, and a Darwinian society.

Yeah. Ideological purity might win you the odd House seat, it ain’t exactly the path to a winning national coalition. Cue Rich:

The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true.  …

<snip>

But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. That’s bad news for even a Republican as conservative as Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose primary opponent in the Texas governor’s race, the incumbent Rick Perry, floated the possibility of secession at a teabagger rally in April and hastily endorsed Hoffman on Thursday.

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode. They drove out Arlen Specter, and now want to “melt Snowe” (as the blog Red State put it). The same Republicans who once deplored Democrats for refusing to let an anti-abortion dissident, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, speak at the 1992 Clinton convention now routinely banish any dissenters in their own camp.

Like I said, good for conservatives for sticking up for what they believe in. But while this may be a conservative country, it ain’t a far right country. And by undermining the GOP and forming their own far right party - the conservative Stalinists slit their own throat.