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Matt Yglesias:

Ever since I read it, I’ve been fascinated by the line in National Review’s endorsement of Mitt Romney which said “Our guiding principle has always been to select the most conservative viable candidate.”

I wouldn’t deny that progressives are prone to a certain amount of tribalism in our internal deliberations, but that kind of explicit ideological maximalism closes off debates on the merits in a weird kind of way. And not only do you see much more ideological maximalism in conservative media, but conservative media is a much more influential force than progressive media. This makes it extremely difficult for arguments on the merits to get off the ground which, in turn, makes it hard to mount persuasive arguments against candidates who you think may be wrong on the merits.

That’s true. Liberals have both a strong progressive wing and a more centrist neoliberal/third-way wing. And these two wings fight a lot because they don’t really like each other very much. But in the end, they’re both genuinely influential. They really do act as countervailing forces to each other within the halls of the Democratic Party.

But Republicans? There’s the tea party wing and that’s about it. Sure, you’ve still got a few Bruce Bartletts, Ross Douthats, and David Frums roaming around, but they’ve basically been excommunicated from the party. For the moment anyway, they have no influence at all. Ditto for the old guard from the George H.W. Bush era, who mostly just keep quiet these days.

Anyway, there’s nothing original here. But it’s still worth repeating once in a while. The Republican Party and the Tea Party are pretty much one and the same now.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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