Part of the effectiveness of the Republican Party as an institution is creating these little hot-house varieties of conservative that get to pretend they’re secretly running things while everyone else is being made a useful idiot.

The billionaire plutocrats think they’re outwitting the evangelicals. The evangelicals think they’ve corralled the neocons. The neocons are convinced they’ve duped the suburanites. The suburbanites are convinced they’ve carved out a Lebensraum that’s safe from the ravages of corporate capitalism. Everyone is selling one another a bill of goods and hoping to get their slice before the pie is handed back to the Democrats.