Show Me The Corpse.

This morning Driftglass wrote a great piece for his usual Sunday Morning Comin' Down column. He normally discusses the lousy quality of guests and discourse on the network Sunday morning news shows. But this time he went into great detail about how Trump has forced the issue of just how bad Dubya's occupation of the presidency was, how Bush was on his way to deification in the mold of Ronald Reagan until...

Dubya started to lose.  And lose badly. He lost two wars,  He lost the economy,  He lost a major American city,  He lost the Congress.  And he lost all those things and so many more in a way that showed the world that the Dirty Hippies had been right about Dubya all along  He really was a criminally incompetent dry-drunk halfwit.  He really did appoint politically-connected idiots to run vitally important parts of the government.   He really was in the thrall of genuinely evil men who operated him like a marionette and made themselves fabulously wealthy thereby.  The base of his party really were raving lunatics, bigots and imbeciles.

All absolutely true. And all absolutely meaningless. If the failures of their god-appointed prophets were somehow enough to shake the faithful, then how could 58,343,671 Americans actually pull the lever for McCain/Palin? You know the answer. Fascists and Authoritarians can always define themselves by what they hate, and what they are against. So why would it matter that one king failed? A mere two years later enough of these 58 million Republicans that went undercover as the tea party showed up to retake the House of Representatives and put villains like Scott Walker into the governors' mansions around the country. Thus ending the tiny two years of Republican exile.

A token truth and reconciliation debate within the GOP primary where the actual, real world crimes and incompetence of Dubya's administration are discussed, solely in terms of which faction of the party will lead the faithful back to power, will not end the Republican Party.

This is the part that confuses me. Driftglass makes this assertion:

The Republican Party is dead, dead, dead and it's various factions have Balkanized into a clutch of squabbling tribes each with its own code of conduct, elaborate rituals and taboos, each laying claim to be the One True Conservative and ransacking the rubble of the Party of Lincoln for the Reagan Arkenstone, and each denying any knowledge of or responsibility for That Which Came Before. (Emphasis mine)

 How does a political party die? I know the causes of death for the empirical, historical political parties in America; the Federalists attempted to be an aristocratic party representing the propertied classes in one section of the country (the Northeast) and as the country grew beyond the coasts there was no way for them to expand, and the Whigs could not face the slavery question and actually did balkanize into know-nothings and free soilers etc. But what would death look like for the GOP today? After the scrum of the primaries is over, every single fox news robot is willing to crawl through broken glass to vote for their nominee. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be raised and spent by super PACs, not to define the "conservative" message but to demonize Democrats and Liberals. Disgraced reptilian party figures will still be gleefully invited onto the news programs to spew lies and slander. The Democratic Party's messaging machine will still be a fart in the wind. The Democratic nominees will still try to get the media to fight their battles for them. The voter suppression measures that Republicans put in place to specifically stop Democrats from voting will still be in place, and no one will say anything meaningful about it. It will simply be "the will of the voters" and Democrats will still offer concession speeches with faith in their hearts that the system works.

Maybe Driftglass is working from a three dimensional chess perspective and I'm missing something. And I do not want this post to sound like I'm criticizing him, as Mulder would say "I want to believe." If someone could explain to me how the whole, writhing mess falls over the cliff and we are finally rid of the "conservative movement" and its husk, I am all ears. After all, even Herbert Hoover has had his reputation repaired. You already have certain individuals on the left saying ridiculous things like "even George W. Bush" as in even George W. Bush refused to demonize the religion of Islam. No, we need to keep fighting or someday apologists will be rehabilitating President Cruz' image as the strong man who purged the rot from our system and bring God back into public life.