Ryan’s proposal has only 13 co-sponsors in the House (out of 178 G.O.P. members). That number is low, he recently conceded, because his colleagues are “talking to their pollsters, and their pollsters are saying: ‘Stay away from this. We’re going to win an election.’ ” Once that election is won, the road will be clear and the ideologues will take over the asylum. Ryan’s radicalism will be abetted by the new House speaker, John Boehner, who didn’t even wait for the BP well to be plugged to announce that “a moratorium on new federal regulations” would be “a great idea.”

In the theoretically more sober Senate, the G.O.P.’s rightward shift is arguably even more drastic. The pernicious Bush economic orthodoxy — tax cuts as a magic elixir to both create jobs and reduce deficits — remains gospel even as two veterans of Reaganomics, Alan Greenspan and David Stockman, have gone public over the past week to disavow it. But factor in the Senate’s rush to xenophobia, and Bush, who pushed hard for immigration reform, starts to look like Nelson Mandela.