James Antle celebrates extinction of the “RINOs” — “Republicans in Name Only” —  in his write-up of Mike Castle’s downfall:

What’s happening? Conservatives have gotten tired of electing Republicans only to get bigger government and massive deficit spending. They are tired of giving their votes and campaign contributions to GOP politicians who pursue conservative goals halfheartedly if at all. They are disgusted that liberal gains, from new government programs to crazed federal court decisions, are seldom reversed but conservative policies like the Bush tax cuts come with an expiration date.

He adds a caveat, however:

few RINOs are as brazen as Castle or Scozzafava. They now have learned to talk like conservatives and check the right boxes on conservative litmus tests even as they expand government once in power. The George Romneys have become Mitt Romneys, the George Bushes George Ws. Will conservatives be as demanding of them?

For now, the answer is probably “no.” The Tea Parties did not want to pick a fight with the Republican establishment to begin with — Tea Party Express, for example, has spent its contributors’ dollars targeting outright liberals like Lisa Murkowski and Mike Castle. It has not taken aim at John Boehner or called for Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn to step aside from their leadership positions. The Tea Parties have tried to play nice, but they now find themselves earning the ire of Karl Rove and other Republican bigwigs. The establishment doesn’t care whether a liberal Republican or a Tea Party Republican gets the nomination in a deep red state like Alaska, but nominating an almost certainly unelectable candidate like O’Donnell in a blue state threatens what Rove and company really care about: returning themselves to power. So now the Tea Parties are coming in for criticism, and if Republicans underperform relative to expectations in November, we know exactly where the Weekly Standard will apportion blame.

This has the potential to goad the Tea Parties into really taking on the establishment. But there’s a lot more to politics beyond elections, and this is where the Tea Parties may find themselves quickly co-opted: after November, legislation and policy will once again be the focus, with journals and think tanks shaping the “conservative” agenda. But these key policy-selling institutions are all in the hands of people who would like to curb the Tea Parties’ anti-establishment impulses and direct their fire against safe targets — preferably Obama. (Think back to the early years of last Republican epoch in Congress, where whatever anti-government impulses the grassroots and their representatives had were blunted by being channeled into mere Clinton-bashing. The dangerously political was transformed into the harmlessly personal.)

Not only are Fox News, the Weekly Standard, and AEI going to be defining the program for whatever Republicans get elected in November, but successful Tea Party candidates will for the most part have to draw upon the same pool of staffing talent that all the other Republicans draw upon, a reservoir composed of cadres of political professionals who live to build careers and sidle up to power, not to shake things up in Washington. Not all staffers will be of that ilk, but even those of a better sort may quickly find themselves dependent upon studies carried out by the establishment’s think tanks and vulnerable to attacks from the establishment’s media organs.

Even beyond personnel and policy, the Tea Parties are vulnerable at the philosophical level, where more articulate and comprehensive views tend to assimilate inchoate ones. The Tea Parties don’t like Obamacare, big spending, or bailouts. But that’s not a worldview, it’s a set of preferences that can be incorporated into any of several worldviews — and subordinated to the overall thrust of whatever ideology it is integrated into. Certainly in the past the GOP has enfolded libertarian and anti-establishment impulses into an ideology whose chief concern was with expanding military and executive power. In order to resist being co-opted again, the Tea Parties would have to stake out a different general view of the world — but who will do that staking out?

Of all the Tea Party candidates, Rand Paul is in the best position to build a viable opposition to the establishment on all fronts, since he can draw upon the intellectual and publicity resources of the Austro-libertarian movement that his father has been instrumental in advancing. Pure libertarians are a rare breed, however; a successful counter-establishment will need to appeal to many types of people. Rand Paul has found come under fire from the purists for doing precisely that.

If the Tea Parties are not going to be assimilated by the very establishment forces who are currently demonizing them, a broad intellectual counter-establishment will have to provide them with an alternative to the policies cooked up by Rove and friends. Not only are there few exponents of such policies at the moment, but I suspect the Tea Parties have been conditioned more strongly than they realize by an establishment that would have them believe that all of the country’s problems can be ascribed to liberal Democrats and “RINOs.”