By any reasonable standard, John Boehner is a bedrock conservative—opposed to big government, pro-life, and in favor of big tax cuts. Boehner would have been placed at the right end of his party a couple of decades ago. But as a realist operating in the real world of divided government and separation of powers, he became a target within his own ranks. Now he is almost at the left end of a party that has gone from center-right to right-center to a place that is more radical than it is conservative—what Tom Mann and I called “an insurgent outlier.” On the verge of losing complete control, Boehner bailed. Boehner, with a month to go, may try to avert a shutdown and make the job of his likely successor, Young Gun Kevin McCarthy, easier. That won’t last long. In the new tribal world of radical politics, the first constitutional office has lost its luster.
Re the rightward shift of the Republican party, see the chart in this post. And Krugman weighs in on Boehner and the GOP here. Of course, to point this out and note that the Democratic party has not become the left-wing analogue of the Republicans is considered “shrill”. On that theme, I send you to driftglass. The biggest problem our country faces today is that one of our two major political parties is now essentially Stalinist. Until that problem is corrected it will be near impossible to develop solutions to problems which require a large-scale coordinated response.