Is GOP sanity just around the corner?

Ed Kilgore also reacts to the Ponnuru column--which is practically a RICO violation disguised as political persuasion--with a dubious assumption:

[W]hatever they say, conservatives will have to accept [in the wake of Obama's reelection] that the Great Counter-Revolution they saw on the near horizon after 2010, which they’ve been pursuing since 1964, has receded into the distance once again.

Staying with the theme of organized crime, it was Michael Corleone who once wisely said that "If history has taught us anything, it's that conservatives will have to accept nothing." Well, he didn't exactly say that, but it's close enough. We're going for the Corleone spirit, and not the letter, of corruption.

But really, after November 2008--after conservatives had blithely ramped up the debt, provoked an insanely bizarre war, thrown millions out of work and ushered in the nation's most severe financial crisis since 1929--after all the conservative chaos and clearly identifiable blame, every rational observer thought that conservatives would huddle and emerge reasonably rational themselves. Yet as we now know, their playbook instead called for precisely the opposite--for a doubling down on the chaos and jaw-dropping pivots from any accountability whatsoever.

Absent the electorate's near-total repudiation of the GOP this November, which scarcely anyone expects, why would conservatives emerge any saner in 2013? I too held a belief, for too long, in contemporary conservatism's ultimate rationality. Hardcore Republicans, however, appear to have passed into a chronic and incurable madness. I suspect they'll make at least one more attempt at taking us all down with them, which is what sociopathic nihilists do.

Comments

[Turgidson]

The sane ones have been primaried out, retired, or lost swing seats in the Democratic waves of 06 and 08.

The 2010 elections gave the rump utter confidence that the majority of Americans are behind them, I think. When Romney loses it'll be because he was insufficiently pure. And their gerrymandering and voter ID shenanigans have forestalled the reckoning, both ideological and demographic, they deserve and will face eventually.

So, no, I don't think sanity is around the corner. It's another hundred miles or so down the road.

[dricey]

This GOP is as capable of evolving toward reason, diversity, and moderation as a rabid badger is capable of evolving into a loving house pet. It will remain, forever, a party of resentful anti-intellectual bigots, largely white and mostly centered in the Deep South and the Plains states. What will eventually emerge is a new party of ex-Blue Dog Democrats and actual conservatives (as opposed to self-described ones), but that lies a decade or more in the future.

[Jon Ponder]

It would be lovely to think that the sorry state of the California GOP is the start of a national trend. The California GOP is so small and weak that it could be drowned in a sink, if we wanted to waste the water.

[majii]

What continues to elude republicans and their supporters is the fact that few/none of them live in the real world. They inhabit a hermetically sealed echo chamber that facts cannot penetrate. They subsist on an endless stream of hate, lies and conspiracy theories. The sad thing is that few of them realize that the party is essentially dead. I think they'll continue to limp along, safely ensconced in their make believe world, while the rest of the world leaves them behind.