I’m trying to reconcile David Brooks’s and Damon Linker’s view of the contemporary Republican Party as an angry faction incapable of governing with these two charts:

It sure looks to me like the Republican Party is governing much of the country. And that’s before adding two more charts, of a virtually impregnable hold on the House of Representatives, and a surprisingly durable hold on the Senate. To the first approximation, Republicans control everything – except the White House. And they have gone from strength to strength even as their confrontational tactics have escalated and escalated. If they don’t nominate another member of the Bush family – and it increasingly looks like they won’t – I’d give the GOP a better than even shot at winning the one major office they currently lack. Far from being an angry faction unwilling to play the game of politics, the GOP has been practically running the table. So why change course? Where’s the mystery?

Now, the GOP may be governing badly. I certainly think they are. In a generation America may look back and say: what on earth were we thinking, putting these people in charge? But we, the people, are the ones who put them in charge. Don’t we need to understand why before we can address the problem we the people have created?

Brooks asks, “have we ever seen bumbling on this scale, people at once so cynical and so naïve, so willfully ignorant in using levers of power to produce some tangible if incremental good?” But isn’t the real question: have we ever seen a nation so eager to reward people so cynical and so naïve? A nation so uninterested in whether their representatives and governors are using levers of power to produce some tangible if incremental good?

It does, indeed, feel like somebody is bad at democracy, and bad at conversation. I’m just not sure that somebody is the House Freedom Caucus, nor even the GOP primary electorate.