The brilliant and articulate columnist Frank Rich has written a insightful article for this past week's New York Magazine. Rich examines the rise to power in America of the fringe radical right and makes a powerful case where it is not going away after this election no matter who wins on November 6. This is a must read for all those concerned about the direction of American politics.

Forewarned is to be prepared. Here are some key excerpts and you can read the rest by clicking here.

"History tells us that American liberals have long underestimated the reach and resilience of the right, repeatedly dismissing it as a lunatic fringe and pronouncing it dead only to watch it bounce back stronger after each setback. That pattern was identified in an influential essay, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” published by the historian Alan Brinkley in 1994. Brinkley was writing two years after the religious right of Pat Robertson had stunned liberals by hijacking the GOP convention from the country-club patrician George H.W. Bush—the same fundamentalist right that had ostensibly retreated from politics after the humiliating Scopes trial in the twenties."

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"Such is the power of denial that we simply refuse to concede that, by the metric of intractability, at least, conservatives are the cockroaches of the American body politic, poised to outlast us all. And so, after Obama’s victory in 2008, the Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg spoke for sentimental liberal triumphalists everywhere when he concluded that America is now “in a progressive period” and that “the conservative movement brought about by the Gingrich revolution has been crushed.” That progressive period lasted all of a year, giving way to the 2009 gubernatorial victories of the conservatives Bob McDonnell (in the purple state of Virginia) and Chris Christie (in blue New Jersey), as well as that summer’s raucous Obamacare protests. Few Democrats had imagined that the new African-American president would be besieged so quickly by a conservative populist movement whose adherents dressed in 1776 drag and worshipped the frothing-at-the-blackboard Glenn Beck. Or that such a movement would administer a “shellacking” in the midterms."

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"Where did these people come from?” asked a liberal friend of mine in Los Angeles this summer as we reminisced about the freak-show characters, from Bachmann to Mr. “9-9-9,” who cycled through the Republican-primary season, sequentially drawing unimaginable throngs of supporters. As Brinkley wrote in 1994, it’s a default liberal assumption that the right’s frontline troops are invariably “poor, provincial folk” or an “isolated, rural fringe” or “rootless, anomic people searching for personal stability,” rather than the perfectly conventional middle- and upper-middle-class suburbanites they often are. We don’t want to believe they’re hiding in plain sight in our own neighborhoods and offices.

This was true at the dawn of the conservative movement in the early sixties, when typical grassroots organizers for the John Birch Society and the Goldwater campaign were not necessarily yahoos from the boonies but “housewives, doctors, dentists, engineers and ministers” from Orange County, in the accounting of the historian Lisa McGirr, whose study Suburban Warriors challenged long-held stereotypes of the American right. Religious and cultural conservatives and vehement anti-­communists were joined by fiercely independent Westerners who, like the Arizonan Goldwater, inherently disdained all eastern incursions, let alone Washington’s, into the nirvana of the former frontier. By breaking with moderate party leaders like Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney and opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Goldwater instantly annexed the old Confederacy to his western crusade as well; no region hated the government more than the swath of states militantly resisting federal enforcement of racial desegregation. (In November, his only electoral votes came from the Deep South and Arizona.)"

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"The right has never stopped believing that its vindication will arrive if voters are given that clear-cut choice. In the early primary season of 2012, nearly 75 percent of the Republican electorate judged Romney too ideologically squishy to offer it. Thanks to the remarkable flameouts of his competitors, Romney won the nomination anyway, but, following Bob Dole and John McCain, he is the end of the line for the desiccated remnants of his father’s more moderate party. The financial base of the GOP, like its voting base, has also completed its shift to the right; David and Charles Koch, after all, are the sons of Fred Koch, who served on Robert Welch’s original Birch Society council. If Mitt goes down, the billionaires will mourn his defeat for all of 24 hours before rallying around pure “constitutional conservatives” of a new generation like the Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan.

And if Romney wins? Like that other usefully anodyne front man John Boehner, he will more often than not do what he’s told by the radical young guns. His main task, as Grover Norquist said in February, will be “to sign the legislation that has already been prepared,” starting with Ryan’s harsh budget. At that dire point, another liberal certitude will offer some comfort to the defeated: The American public will rise up in revulsion at a draconian government downsizing of its New Deal and Great Society entitlements and will return the Democrats to power. That is entirely possible, but it’s still worth asking whether this as-yet-untested assumption might be as self-deluding as all the previous premature death knells for the American right."

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"Latinos, America’s fastest-growing minority, are the most obvious obstacle to the right’s political future. Romney’s embrace of the most extreme immigration arsenal, from vowing to veto the Dream Act to endorsing a Mexican border fence, has assured that Obama will win the Latino vote by a landslide—and possibly the election along with it. And yet the GOP could overcome this burden over the long term. It was as recently as 2004 that George W. Bush drew nearly 40 percent of the Latino vote while trying (without success) to prod his party toward a kinder immigration policy. A new generation of Republican presidential contenders who want to win—and not just Marco Rubio—will put the highest priority on trying to save the GOP from its rapidly approaching demographic apocalypse.

Such a comeback won’t happen easily, or overnight, or without a major purge of the nativists within conservative ranks. But if history has taught us anything over the past half-century, it’s that the American right’s death wish is a figment of the liberal imagination. For Obama’s supporters, even a 2012 victory is likely to prove but a temporary high".