Originally Posted by
Taimar
It's deeper than that, and I don't think there's any way to extricate themselves at this stage.
Point 1. The policy playbook that they have clung to for the past 40 years is essentially one which doesn't work at all for anybody but the wealthy. Their policies are demonstrably bad, poorly thought out, and often based on nothing more than somebody's intuition, repeated 4,000 times by friendly think tanks. They simply don't do anything to make society better or life better for the vast majority of Americans. And it's obvious.
Tax cuts for the wealthy and shrinking the scope of what Government does for people, busting up unions, cutting regulation, taking a laissez-faire approach to any and all markets - if we had never tried these things, perhaps they'd have some sort of point to make.
But we've literally tried all of these things for 40 years and all it's gotten us is a diminished country where people have fewer opportunities, live worse lives, and where the income gap is as large or larger than it was the peak of the gilded age.
The only people who believe that GOP economic policies are good are people who are either very wealthy or thoroughly bamboozled. So they haven't really been genuinely able to win on a grand scale with policy alone for ages.
Point 2. They have relied on nativism, xenophobia, religious zealotry and racism for so long, and fed their voter base a steady diet of outrage for so long, that they cannot digest anything else. They are now prisoners to this base, having gerrymandered themselves into safe districts, they fear only primary challengers who can turn the outrage quotient up to 11. So of course, they back ever more radical social views. We are now at a point where a CHILD MOLESTER is likely to win a seat in the U.S. Senate because he presents views that the nativist, xenophobic, Christian fascist base feels good about.
This base cares more about sticking it to people they don't like than any practical concern. The world could burn down around them and they wouldn't complain so long as the people they hate were burned first.
This is entirely a phenomenon of their own making - they have encourage this for decades, and have used it so long and so often, it'd be impossible to fully dissociate from it.
Point 3. Even this was not enough to maintain power. So they turned to gerrymandering. They have controlled most redistricting efforts from the last two censuses, and have created bizarrely configured but thoroughly safe districts. As if that weren't good enough, they've also sought in every way possible to suppress the votes of people who would turn out to vote against them, and to depress voting totals in general, which favors them.
They could not win only on policy, so they turned to culture wars. They could not win on culture wars alone, so they decided to cheat.
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To come down from this would require a large number of republicans to look back on the last 30+ years of their lives and say "You know, I've been wrong about everything, and it's time I did the right thing, even if it means my career's over."
They do not have the kind of character or courage that this would require - so you can bet they'll be going down with the ship.