As anyone who has ever been in junior high or high school knows, peer pressure can not only make individuals do and say things they wouldn't otherwise do or say - but taken to extremes, it can even be deadly.
In some twisted 'Lord of the Flies' kind of way, the Republican Party is beginning to find this out all over again as the internal politics of political puritanism they've followed over the last two decades finally bear their twisted, rotten fruit in the form of the Republican Party Civil War.
As with any so-called civil war, there are no real winners in a conflict of this kind, only degrees of losing. There have been small skirmishes in this affair for many years, now; the Bush-McCain battle in 2000, for example. This year, there have already been more than a few political causalities, including the Presidential campaigns that never came to be for Mike Huckabee and Mitch Daniels.
But the 'Fort Sumter' shot of this Republican civil war was fired earlier this week, in two parts.
The first part was the embarrassing loss on Tuesday by Republicans in the 26th Congressional District of New York. In 2010, even when the rest of New York state thought bombastic, crazy Carl Palladino was too conservative, even for them, the 26th chose Palladino. Yet on Tuesday night, the voters in New York's 26th gave the Democratic candidate a six point victory over the GOP's pick.
For comparison, using statistics, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com pointed out that average candidates in the 26th, in a two-way race, should have resulted in an outcome where the Republican won by 12 points. In case you're unclear, that's an 18 point swing, from Republican to Democratic, from what it should have been, to what it was, in a district so conservative that political wonks used to refer to it as 'ruby red.'
That loss, while embarrassing to Republicans, was merely the light flash from the metaphorical gun.
The bullet was the failed vote in the Senate on Wednesday of the Republican budget, which would have killed Medicare as we know it.
With the exception of five Republican Senators - including, surprisingly, Rand Paul of Kentucky - EVERY Republican Senator voted to kill Medicare on Wednesday.
It's a fact acknowledged by nearly everyone on both sides of the left-right political divide, that when the 2012 elections heat up this summer and fall, everyone trying to unseat a Republican - including other nominal Republicans - will be pillorying anyone who voted for the Republican budget proposal that failed so spectacularly on Wednesday.
We hate to repeat ourselves two days in a row, but we've warned our Republican friends of this day for many years, now. The insanity of political puritanism is exactly what exploded in the face of the Democratic Party in 1980, dividing the far left from the center-left for a dozen years.
Thirty years later, it appears the Republican Party may be about to - finally - go through a similar maturation process.
We'd like to think Republicans will refrain from completely savaging one another, as they enter into the full-fledged phase of their intra-party civil war.
We'd like to to think that - but, sadly, we know better.
