Why do Republicans keep stepping in the same pile of cow dung?

Brink Lindsey, of Niskanen Center noted: “You don’t need conscious intent to produce dysfunction to explain Republican governance failures.”

In Lindsey’s view,

it starts in ideological self-delusion — that government is simply incapable of performing well, so starving it of funds is always a good idea and trying to make it work better is a waste of time. The problem starts there, as I said, but it doesn’t end there, as these attitudes can very easily merge into cynical, lazy indifference to public administration and onward to outright venality and corruption. And, of course, this ideological stance turns out to be incredibly convenient for rich donors looking for any excuse to keep their taxes down.

This is not, according to Lindsey,

a conspiracy, but rather a rotten equilibrium. Lack of trust in government brings charlatans to power, further reducing trust in government and widening the path to power for future charlatans.

Couple this with an electorate that has received poor K-12 education for the last 20+ years, so that they can be convinced of anything.  Republicans propaganda machine, Fox News does just that. 

Will Wilkinson, the vice president for research at Niskanen observed:

It’s going to get worse for the G.O.P. as the urgency of the economic problems grows. But they just don’t understand that pushing the same button over and over isn’t going to have the same effect. And this is so in part because they don’t really want to see the seriousness of economic divergence, because they have no idea what to do about it that is remotely consistent with Zombie Reagan social policy dogma.