YOU CAN COMPROMISE ON IDEOLOGY. YOU CAN'T COMPROMISE ON THEOLOGY.

Joe Nocera of The New York Times didn't agree with the Paul Ryan approach to Medicare before interviewing him on Tuesday, and doesn't agree with it now -- but he's having the standard centrist hand-wring reaction to Tuesday's election results and the Democratic counterattack to Ryan:

I was not won over.... Not that I expected to be....

Yet I found myself disheartened as I read about the Democrats' gleeful reaction to the victory in New York. They had a strategy now: bash the Republicans into submission over the Ryan plan....

Why is this discouraging? Because even if Ryan's solution is wrongheaded, he's right that Medicare is headed for trouble. It might not be in nine years, but as health care costs continue to rise uncontrollably, and as baby boomers continue to age, Medicare will gobble up an ever larger percentage of the federal budget....

It would be nice if we could treat the Ryan plan not as an object of derision but as a launching off point for a serious debate....

With a different set of political actors, maybe we could use this "as a launching off point for a serious debate." But these are modern Republicans we're talking about. You can have a serious debate, and an acceptable middle-ground solution, with people who merely have a different ideology. But Republicans' belief in Ryanism is -- this is the most charitable interpretation -- theology.

At best, Ryan and the Ryanettes believe that Ryancare will provide satisfactory coverage of seniors' health care needs, at an appropriate cost to both government and seniors themselves, because the omniscient, omnipotent Invisible Hand will provide -- it is God, therefore it must provide. It is good and beneficent; it can do no wrong.

The less charitable view is that they believe Ryancare would sort the senior population into the saved and the damned -- with both groups deserving their fate based on the choices they'd made (as Rand, the Prophet, foretold). This is theological as well.

Either way, the Republicans will never negotiate in good faith. You can't show them numbers demonstrating that their assumptions are wrong, because their numbers can't be wrong -- the God of the Free Market would not forsake her people. Either that or the God of the Free Market would not forsake anyone who did not deserve to be forsaken. They don't negotiate from our reality -- the one we think of as everyone's common reality. They're completely faith-based.