Conservatism's Greatest Victory

...was not kneecapping the American economy with Reaganomics, sacking the American treasury or fucking up American foreign policy almost beyond repair.  

America has recovered from worse problems than those before.  

From Moyers and Company (emphasis added):

...

Just four-and-a-half years ago, Washington mainstays Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein shocked the inside-the-Beltway establishment (especially the press, with its silent pact to speak no evil of wrongdoers lest they deny you an interview) when they published their book, It’s Even Worse than It Looks. The two esteemed political scientists wrote, “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

In the years since, an ugly situation has only gotten increasingly dire, with right-wing radicals whipped into a frenzy by a Republican establishment that thought it could use their rage, only to find it running amok and beyond their control. In a recent interview with Francis Wilkinson of Bloomberg View, Norman Ornstein said, “The future still looks pretty grim.” And Thomas Mann noted, “The burden is on the GOP because they are currently the major source of our political dysfunction. No happy talk about bipartisanship can obscure that reality. Unless other voices and movements arise within the Republican Party to changes its character and course, our dysfunctional politics will continue.”

...

I would just add that, in the years since, neither Mr. Mann nor Mr. Ornstein nor anyone capable of carrying their message has been able to threaten, cajole, bribe or pry their way into the Sunday show circuit with the Jaws of Life. 

Because the greatest feat Conservatism ever accomplished was relentlessly bludgeoning and buffaloing the profession of journalism to the point where it's main national purveyors are forbidden on pain of professional exile to talk about the plainly observable, incontrovertible and disastrous reality which is happening right in their own back yard.