"In politics, the side with a fixed notion of ends and an unscrupulous approach to means always has the advantage"

George Packer brings clarity to the essential nature of today's GOP - their goals and their means - as "The Budget War" is being waged in Washington:

Rep. Ryan: "This is not a budget. It's a cause."

The Republicans now hold just one house of Congress, yet they have controlled the terms of the debate, because they understand that budget battles are about far more than numbers, and they’ve made the ideology behind their various bargaining positions startlingly clear: government should be reduced to gasping for air. What’s more, they’re willing to deploy legislative terrorism—threatening to shut down the government and to allow the United States to default on its debt—to get their way. In politics, the side with a fixed notion of ends and an unscrupulous approach to means always has the advantage.

A decade and a half after Clinton and Gingrich, Republicans are once again trying to privatize Medicare, gut Medicaid (by turning it into block grants), cut education spending and regulations that protect the environment, and give yet another round of tax cuts to the rich. They continue to insist—despite years of evidence to the contrary—that market forces will lower health-care costs and that tax cuts will create economic growth and lift all incomes. “Ideology makes it unnecessary for people to confront individual issues on their individual merits,” the late Daniel Bell wrote. “One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae.” Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. 

Those are, in truth, the most salient points one can know about the current debate over budget priorities and our country's economic agenda moving forward. It isn't a "debate" so much as ideological combat waged from a far right, rigidly partisan camp that eschews pragmatism in approaching problems and rejects the conflicting empirical evidence to their deeply embedded nostrums and schemes.

To have even modest success at playing anything other than a weakened defense, Democrats must recognize the true nature of their opponents in the "budget wars" and respond forcefully - within "the Beltway" certainly, but more importantly in the public arena, in the media and in every congressional district that has any chance of being contested in 2012.

Packer's entire piece is HERE, at The New Yorker.