These conservatives are the cockroaches of the electorate or something

Goldwater’s ideas—bizarre and otherwise—would eventually change the trajectory of the country, as Barack Obama would acknowledge, to some Democrats’ dismay, when appraising Reagan’s legacy in 2008. But no matter how many times the conservative bogeyman came back from the dead along the way, liberals were shocked at every resurrection. Whether it was the rise of Reagan, the coming of Scalia-Thomas “originalism” to the Supreme Court, or the Gingrich revolution of 1994, we were always gobsmacked.

Such is the power of denial that we simply refuse to concede that, by the metric of intractability, at least, conservatives are the cockroaches of the American body politic, poised to outlast us all. And so, after Obama’s victory in 2008, the Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg spoke for sentimental liberal triumphalists everywhere when he concluded that America is now “in a progressive period” and that “the conservative movement brought about by the Gingrich revolution has been crushed.” That progressive period lasted all of a year, giving way to the 2009 gubernatorial victories of the conservatives Bob McDonnell (in the purple state of Virginia) and Chris Christie (in blue New Jersey), as well as that summer’s raucous Obamacare protests. Few Democrats had imagined that the new African-American president would be besieged so quickly by a conservative populist movement whose adherents dressed in 1776 drag and worshipped the frothing-at-the-blackboard Glenn Beck. Or that such a movement would administer a “shellacking” in the midterms…

One can almost write the obituaries for the right that would appear after a Romney defeat right now. Even the millions spent by Karl Rove’s sugar daddies in the post–Citizens United era had failed to sell a far-right GOP to American voters. Once again the republic has been saved from the crazies by good old bipartisan centrist common sense.

Dream on.