David Brooks has a good piece...

...in the Times today about the intellectual state of the Republican Party. Two points, in particular, caught my attention. The first is (and, as always, my emphasis):

There are millions of voters who, while alarmed by the Democrats’ lavish spending, still look to government to play some positive role. They fled the G.O.P. after the government shutdown of 1995, and they would do so again.

It would be a fiscal tragedy. Over the next decade there will have to be spending cuts and tax increases. If Republicans decide that even the smallest tax increases put us on the road to serfdom, then there will never be a deal, and the country will careen toward bankruptcy.

But that's part of the problem. There are some Republicans who wouldn't mind a federal bankruptcy. They see demolishing the current system as the only way to transform it.

Brooks's second point:

Most important, it would be an intellectual tragedy. Conservatism is supposed to be nonideological and context-driven. If all government action is automatically dismissed as quasi socialist, then there is no need to think. A pall of dogmatism will settle over the right.

And that's my problem with ideology: it's lazy. Rather than tackling each problem individually, ideologues simply plug each round peg into each round hole -- beautiful!

There's only one little problem with that: not all pegs are round. Some are square; some are of indeterminate shape. (And not all holes are perfectly round, either.)

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the universe is an infinitely complicated place and many of the problems it presents do not lend themselves to easy answers. Sorry, ideologues (on the right and the left).