So this is it, huh? This is where we've been headed all along? This is where the path has been leading us, to default and/or shutdown and a political donnybrook for the ages?

It makes sense. In fact, I guess it was almost inevitable. The tensions created by two decades of unsettling cultural and demographic change, compounded by a major economic dislocation, followed by the election and a re-election of a president that some still cannot accept as legitimate, had to be resolved in some major cataclysm, and this is how it's going to happen.

This is how white people riot.

Officially, of course, it's all about ObamaCare. If you read that absurdly long list of demands put together by House leadership, it's also about the Keystone pipeline, tort reform, off-shore drilling and the Dodd-Frank bill, among other things. But the truth is, it's about none of those things. Take another look at that list, and then realize that to members of the House GOP, it is still not enough. Incredible as it seems, GOP hard-liners are telling Speaker John Boehner that they will not vote to raise the debt ceiling and avert economic damage unless that farcical list of demands is expanded considerably.

Because really, what this is about can't be put on a list. The Republican base wants and needs a fight. It wants a no-holds-barred, smash-the-butt-end-of-your-Bud-bottle-against-the-bar, eye-gouging, all-out brawl. For years now, it has been trying to screw its courage to the sticking point, carefully nurturing its anger, frustrations and resentments in hopes of reaching an emotional state in which backing down is no longer an option.

I think that part of the plan has now been accomplished.

This fight is also about control. People who believe that the right to run this country is theirs by birthright now see that right slipping away from them, and they don't know how to reclaim it. They lost the 2008 election to a man named Barack Obama. They lost the fight over ObamaCare, which Jim DeMint promised would be Obama's Waterloo and would "break him." They lost in the Supreme Court. And in the 2012 elections, they lost once again. They believed they would "take back America," and they failed.

Briefly, in the immediate aftermath of that 2012 defeat, some Republican leaders dared to risk self-reflection. For a little window in time, they entertained the notion that maybe, just maybe, the problem lay within the party itself, with its tone and its policies and its attitudes. That window was then slammed shut. Making changes of that sort would have required the party to recalibrate itself to this new America, and they were not and are not ready to do that. It was easier to shrug off their losses as the result of voter fraud, skewed polling, media bias, anti-white racism and an insufficiently conservative and combative candidate in Mitt Romney.

That's what this is about. Unwilling to accept the verdict of past elections, Republicans hope to give the American people one last glorious opportunity to see conservative ideals in action, one last opportunity to side with them against the usurpers. They are putting the question to the country in no uncertain terms: "Who's it going to be, America? Us or them?"

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think they're going to like the way this ends. A lot of people within their own party believe they aren't going to like the way this ends. In fact, you see epiphanies popping up in the strangest of places these days. Mona Charen, a conservative, party-line columnist who has never struck me as a truth-teller, warns her fellow conservatives  in National Review that "Obamacare is law because we lost the election, not because we failed some virility test."

"Another fixed-bayonets charge at the law would do nothing to prevent implementation — not unless 15 Democratic senators decided to change their positions and President Obama slapped his palm to his forehead exclaiming, 'You’re right!'", she points out.

Then she directs her message at the GOP base: "It’s easier to imagine that the nation’s decline could be avoided if only Republicans were more courageous than to face the reality that the nation has changed. No country that voted for Barack Obama twice is simply pining for purer conservative standard bearers."

Unfortunately, the time has probably long since passed when such outbreaks of clarity might have had an effect. After working themselves into this frenzy, the GOP's Armaggedon caucus can't back down from it without looking like cowards and appeasers, to use Ted Cruz' inflammatory term. I hope they find a way to do so, but I just don't see it. They have riled up the base with visions of martial glory, and the base is demanding that those visions be made real.

If it happens, the country is going to be damaged by it; both parties are going to be damaged by it, as will a lot of political careers. But again, it seems we were destined to get to this moment and this place sooner or later. If it's a fight that we must have in order to move on, let's have it, and we'll see where we are once the smoke clears and the dust settles.