Pictured: a Very Sensible, uh, pundit.

So the other day the Very Sensible Pundit David Brooks lamented the possibility that “the Tea Party style” — apparently, “a narcissistic sense of victimization, an egomaniacal belief in one’s own rightness and purity, a willingness to distort the truth so that every conflict becomes a contest of pure good versus pure evil” — may perhaps, just perhaps, be “beginning to replicate itself in parts of the conservative world.”

I know — it sounds implausible. The American right wing, behaving like this?

But no, Brooks intones, it’s true! Why, these days, even Newt Gingrich is starting to sound a tiny bit nutty, a clear “sign of how severely the normal intellectual standards have been weakened.”

But not to worry: the “Tea Party style” has not yet caused any real problems. As Brooks explains, “that damage is all in the future.”

So relax. There has as of yet not been any “damage” whatosever wreaked by American right-wingers employing a bizarre sense of victimization to accomplish ideologically extremist ends while distorting the truth and panicking the nation into disaster by invoking feverish apocalyptic rhetoric based on Good v. Evil, or, heaven forfend, “With us” v. “Against Us” constructions.

What a relief. Otherwise the country might just be in a bit of trouble, mired in stupid wars and afflicted by a crap economy nobody in power actually cares about fixing.

We totally dodged a bullet in that the last Republican administration was so very conservative and sensible and not at all ideologically extreme, and that the current administration has no timidity whatsoever when it comes to standing up to right-wing fearmongering, because that sort of thing right now is only a Distant Rumor of Bad Stuff to Come, and probably won’t happen anyhow. The Republican Establishment is much too judicious and principled for that to be a concern.

So chin up, America! We have every reason to hope! Why, even Newt Gingrich is starting to realize the dangers of a paranoid style, and has thankfully returned to more sober and thoughtful policy positions, like pointing out to the nation that we currently live under “Soviet tyranny” and that the Constitution is about to be replaced by Radical Islamicist Sharia law.

Nothing, you see, would be more dangerous to America than for us to suddenly stop taking American Conservative Intellectual Thinkers seriously.