Republican Ideology Death Knells 2

Yesterday, in The Death Knells Of Republican Ideology Might Take America Down Too, I wrote:

Fear drove the House Republicans to vote against the rescue bill yesterday.  Not fear of an economic calamity but fear of their own ideology's demise. As I wrote in Voodoo Economics Is Dead: 

The reigning economic philosophy, the one that has gripped this country for decades, defined the "norm" and kept the Republicans in power, is Voodoo Economics (aka Reaganomics) with its belief in unruled markets, unlimited deficits, unpatriotic tax cuts for the rich and unproven, trickle down benefits for everyone else.

Those "conservative" Republicans have now doubled down on their ideological bet.  They have killed the bill designed to rescue our economy from the effects of their religious zealot belief in "free markets." The ultimate irony, however, is that by doing so, they may have killed the goose that, ever since Reagan, has enabled the American way of life and has kept the GOP in power: deficits and the world's willingness to finance them.

Thanks to Stephen Colbert, I now have a smoking gun that proves my point as to why the GOP really voted down the bill. Watch California Republican Darrell Issa say on the House floor that "Today we're ending the Reagan era if we vote for this."

{11:30 Update} Harold Meyerson makes a similar point using somewhat more mainstream language:

The proposal asked Republicans to acknowledge the failure of the market and the capacity of government to set things right. It asked them to repudiate their worldview, to go against the beliefs that impelled many of them to enter politics in the first place.

So as America experienced a financial crisis, House Republicans experienced a crisis of faith. And on Monday, most of them opted to stick to their faith, whatever the financial consequences for the nation. Many of the Republicans' counterproposals to the bailout bill were so wide of the mark that they can be understood only as faith-based solutions to empirical problems ...

It's not just investment banks that have fallen by the wayside in the recent carnage; it's the ideology of unregulated capitalism -- of Reaganism. And if Republicans cannot find a way to disenthrall themselves from their faith in their old gods, they may ensure that the GOP itself becomes one more casualty in the collapse of laissez faire.