When he says that the GOP deserves to feel “some pain,” Jonah is referring primarily to elections. But, of course, elections are not merely about which party holds power; they are also about what is done with that power. And if, as Jonah desires, conservatives were to establish a third party likely to “throw the election to the Democrat” — and accepting Jonah’s premises about the current state of the GOP makes it fair to assume that this would indeed be the likely outcome — they would be . . . well, throwing the next election to the Democrats. At present, the Democrats have just 50 votes in the Senate, and a cushion of only three in the House of Representatives, and still they are trying to remake the country. With just a few more legislators in tow — especially in the Senate, where the most radical parts of their agenda are being held up by just two among their 50 members — they would be likely to succeed in this endeavor. Jonah suggests in his essay that “many on the right had modest hopes for President Biden” (if so, I was not among them) but concedes those hopes have now been dashed. To which I would say: Just wait until he has carte blanche.

It is possible that Jonah believes that the consequences of a Democratic sweep would be worth it in the long run. But it is highly unlikely that many other people do. Indeed, it is precisely because the Democrats are not the moderates “many on the right” hoped they were that Jonah’s scheme would face such steep odds of success. Jonah allows that America’s “right-of-center voters” are now angry enough with Joe Biden that the “Democrats are facing a midterm bloodbath.” But if this is true after just nine months of unified Democratic control, one wonders how he imagines those voters would feel after a landslide Democratic victory brought with it a federal takeover of the election system, de facto open borders, the full Bernie Sanders economic agenda, a set of historically aggressive gun-control measures, a codified Roe v. Wade, single-payer health care, and, potentially, a packed Supreme Court.