How big a deal is the surprise primary defeat of Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader? Very. Movement conservatism, which dominated American politics from the election of Ronald Reagan to the election of Barack Obama — and which many pundits thought could make a comeback this year — is unraveling before our eyes.

I don’t mean that conservatism in general is dying. But what I and others mean by “movement conservatism,” a term I think I learned from the historian Rick Perlstein, is something more specific: an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists.

By rejecting Mr. Cantor, the Republican base showed that it has gotten wise to the electoral bait and switch, and, by his fall, Mr. Cantor showed that the support network can no longer guarantee job security. For around three decades, the conservative fix was in; but no more.

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 I wrote two comments today, addressing separate issues:

To read my first comment, click here:

We are headed for trouble sooner than 2016. The end of this summer will bring another round of Debt Ceiling and budget votes, right in time for the election. How likely are Republicans to give a tenth of an inch in negotiations?

Moving left is worthless if people aren’t going to the polls. That they aren’t voting is a fact. Pew Research published a study today and the two most alarming facts from it are these:

To read my second comment, click here.

Cantor was an opportunist who did the Koch’s bidding. The big lesson, for the Kochs, in Cantor’s loss, is that when you lie down with dogs, you catch fleas.