Conservatives losing now - so what happens next year?

Digby has a clear explantation of what to expect next January.

The Republicans have fielded five presidents since 1968 and only one of them can be considered politically successful. One out of five. The rest have crashed and burned each time on incompetence, corruption or some combination of the two. I think it's fair to say that neither the modern Republican party or the conservative movement is capable of governance.

So what happens next is that the current leaders who will have failed -- that is, not won an election. Iraq and Katrina are not failures to conservatives, since government can't do anything anyway. Only losing elections is a failure to a conservative or Republican, and since Conservatism is perfect, those who lose do so because they are not conservative enough.

Democrats believe in government and they want to make it work. Republicans see government purely as a means to exert power. Unfortunately, they are not very good at that because in the modern world sheer, dumb might is no longer possible. The best they can do is loot the treasury and leave the rest of their mess to be cleaned up by the Democrats.

What they really excel at is politics. Governance just hangs them up. And don't think for a moment that they will be chagrined or ashamed and crawl off into a hole to lick their wounds. Being defeated liberates them to do what they are really good at --- destroying the opposition and pushing their agenda with sophisticated, scorched earth political rhetoric. It's not natural for them to be on the defense and they don't like it. They are going back to their natural state --- victimhood and the aggressive attack.

Get ready. The Democrats will not only have to govern, but they will have to fix all the problems they've created while fighting them every step of the way. They're not going away. And they will pull out every stop to win every election, not because they necessarily want to govern but because that's how you keep score. For a long, long time they've been able to get their way whether they win or lose and they see no reason to doubt that will continue. And unless we put a stop to this they might be right.

Conservatives are natural outsiders. They have no measure for success as outsiders except winning elections.

There is no Katrina rescue for an outsider to fail. It is the insiders, those who run the government, who have such tasks of governance by which success and failure can be measured.

So House Republicans will move back to their natural position as the minority party. Perhaps this is true for the Senate Republicans. They will then set up screams and attacks on Democrats that make those against Clinton seem mild, because they will resent being replaced.

It's not going to be pretty.