Will Republicans Survive the Holocaust? Maybe, but Not as the Party of the Rich.

Ersatz conservatism got a free ride for decades. The party is over, to mix metaphors.

What the hell are these guys smiling at? Their pensions?

It's all well and good for Republican "insiders" to maintain there's life after Trump, but if wishes were horses than beggars would exit the GOP like somebody left the barn door open, to mix metaphors, again.

Martin Longman of Political Animal explains it like the keen political analyst he is.

To me, though, the question is about enduring change, by which I mean that we want to know if the GOP will snap back into being once the presidential election is over.

And, to answer that question, you want to know what’s happening to their mechanisms of power. You want to know how they’ve been successful and whether they’ll still have all the tools to be successful with the same strategies that have worked in the past.

So, I look at a variety of factors. There’s the three-legged stool of free-market capitalism, massive defense spending, and social conservatism. What happens when Wall Street backs a Democratic nominee, neoconservatives back a Democratic nominee, and a Democratic president locks in a Supreme Court that will be reliably pro-choice for more than a generation? Seems to me that the Republican stool is left as a pile of sawdust.

What would hold it from springing back? Lots of factors:

What happens to the Republicans’ traditional advantage with message discipline when they’ve lost the free trade argument with their own base, the social conservatives have no dog in the fight anymore, and the isolationist wing of the party is at near-parity with the internationalists?

What happens to their partisan media dominance when the talking heads are all squabbling with each other, blaming each other for their failures, and can’t agree to push one united message through each news cycle?

They lose their money advantage, the passion of their door-knocking envelope-licking foot soldiers, the ability to grind their wurlizter until their base is in a mass hypnosis, and any agreement on their basic raison d’être.

Would be nice to see that. Why can't the rich continue to use conservatism as a tool of hypnotism?

There are always more poor people than rich people, so a party for rich people cannot compete on an equal playing field. They always need to distract and divert attention from the fact that their policies are primarily aimed at giving rich people what they want. That’s why partisan media dominance is critical. That’s why a unified message is indispensable. That’s why they need to march in lockstep and never validate criticisms coming from the other side. 

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And the biggest realignment of them all is the youth vote, because although they’re only voting for the first or second time, they’re not conservatives and they have no sympathy for conservatives, and they could not be more unimpressed with conservatives.

Add it all up, and you have a party that needed a bunch of things to win because rich people are always outnumbered. And those things are all either shattered or burning like a dumpster fire.

Read all of Longman for the whole picture. It's not the Bolshevik Revolution, but I wouldn't make book on conservatives for a while. Republicans in some reinvented, Eisenhower/Rockefeller shape-shift, maybe, but the days of the robber barons are numbered.

And we have Trump, likely, to thank.