Some comments in other threads made me think about this - as a lot of people have noted, once you've mainlined pure Trumpian ****tardary it may be hard to go back - but he ain't gonna live forever and he's likely politically dead in two years.

So where does the GOP go? We had a GOP governor in Nevada named Sandoval who got term limited out, but could have been guv for life if not for that - he's hispanic, so kind of immunized against the stupidity in that area (I can't recall him ever saying much about immigration). He increased Medicaid, and actually articulated reasons for his decisions while in office. Can someone like him jerk the GOP back to some sort of sanity - or will they go the way of the Whigs, and another party take their place? Our political system pretty much makes a two party contest inevitable, but I don't see that anything says it has to be the Dems and the GOP as the two....

MM MD

-7500 a succession of white old blokes who like the guns and the family values
+5000 field

Simple. Trump created the alt-right playbook. A primary without Trump is probably going to be a bunch of political operators who will be more motivated and intelligent than Trump while holding the same exact positions. In that mix will be Donald Trump Jr. or Ivanka Trump.

some multimillionaire megachurch con artist or jerry falwell jr will take over the party with a theocratic fascist platform and democrats will respond by shifting right and running a bunch of former republicans as democrats. from there, a coalition of centrist democrats and right-wing democrats will achieve something approximating the contemporary republican political agenda.

I don't have a ton of historical knowledge but I believe authoritarian figures like Trump don't always usher in more authoritarian figures afterward. The individual people matter a lot.

But in this case, it really doesn't feel like a blip. The trend toward authoritarianism on the right has been steadily growing for some time. And there's an international trend in that direction as well, which points to this being a movement and not something that is significantly based on one guy.

So, I guess it depends on what you mean by "sanity". I mean, I would guess the next GOP President will be more stately, and won't be as stupid as Trump. But I don't think Republicans are going to move away from authoritarianism anytime soon. Especially when they may need to double down on anti-democratic policies to hold onto power.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid

What makes you think they need a popular mandate?

I'm not sure. The insanity and boorishness are features, not bugs. I don't think they can go back to dog whistles after a bunch of years of megaphones.

The democrats can revive the republican party by moving to the left and creating the need for a normal right wing party - currently that niche is too much occupied by the democrats.

At some point, they will wipe their hands of him, and go back to more subtle racism to keep the deplorables voting for them and then the rich people will go back to their tax cuts and deregulation. Pence is waiting in the wings for all this to happen.

you scare me sometimes

but most of the time you make me laugh so its all good

In all seriousness, the best model for the GOP post-2016 is the post-Attitude Era WWE when the industry sabotaged itself with hotshotting and constant envelope-pushing that left the fans craving unsustainable levels of spectacle. I don't actually know enough about wrestling to know what happened after that but maybe Dvaut can chime in on how the industry recovered. The GOP as a brand is way too entrenched for it just go away like the Whigs any time soon, so I think there's going to have to be some kind of rehab period where the grownups take away the racism crackpipe for a while.

might happen occasionally but unless the republican base changes then the Pences' will generally lose to the opportunistic populist.

If something more fundamental doesn't change then it's back to dodging bullets until next time.

GOP doesn’t need to come back from Rump

Gerrymandering, the EC and a titanic shift in the Supreme Court between Obama and 2020 has already got them a yuge headstart

American apartheid is very possible at some point during my lifetime.

The US is projected to be 'minority white' in 2045. In 2050, 30% of the American population will be Hispanic.

Do you really think that will be represented in those who control the country? White politicians are going to see the demographics turning against them. The boomers will be dead, millennials are more liberal, and minorities are more likely to vote Democrat. But politicians won't give up their control without a fight. I bet a whole lot of white Democrats show their true colors when this happens and become hardline anti-immigrant politicians.

Apartheid is a real threat and I feel bad for future generations.

If it goes like CA has so far, they will stick to their guns and become more and more irrelevant, while maintaining a veto in the supreme court for 15+ years and having a filibuster-proof minority in the Senate (though I can see states like KS and Iowa electing dems again). I expect dems to take the Senate in 2020, as the Republican brand is just too tarnished. I don't see a post-Nixon type snap-back after the Trump wreckage, as the average Nixon voter was arguably significantly more liberal than the GOP in Nixon's time.

Pretty sure if they change their position on healthcare they’ll be fine for a while.

I don't see a post-Nixon type snap-back after the Trump wreckage, as the average Nixon voter was arguably significantly more liberal than the GOP in Nixon's time.[/QUOTE]

I dunno about how liberal most of those Nixon voters were, tbh. At that time non-whites pretty much didn't exist in most of America, or were at least pretty much invisible. I grew up in Burbank Cal, and had a grand total of one interaction with a black person before I graduated high school. I'd guess my high school was 95% white 5% Hispanic and the one black girl. There wasn't anyone around to be racist against. So you didn't have to racist to be a Nixon voter in a large part of the country, any more than you had to be anti-unicorn.

I'd also argue that Trump is so bat**** crazy that it's possible that a fair number of potential GOP voters will just treat him like a crazy uncle locked up in the cellar that they don't talk about after the crash occurs. If the GOP can shift back to a reasonable sounding immigration policy (which they had not that long ago, at least in part) and figure out some sort of solution to the health care issue that sounds vaguely plausible, they may be able to turn it around. Or not.

MM MD

Brain fart. I meant to say conservative, suggesting that the GOP moved more conservative even despite Nixon's scandles because its voters we're ready to be sold by Reagan/Gingrich/Fox. These days I don't think that's the case, and the GOP will have to moderate after Trump.

Liberals won the culture war. GOP just has to figure out how to surrender.

Yeah, that sounds right. Although I'd argue that Reagan at least initially didn't sell himself as a hard right guy.

Surrendering can be tricky, though. Especially if the side that needs to surrender tends to bayonet anyone that mentions it.

MM MD

This is a weird thread. At the end of GWB's tenure, he'd gotten the US into a disastrous war which killed and injured tens of thousands of Americans and turned the region into a basket case. The deficit was through the roof. A major financial crisis was underway. His approval rating right around the 2008 election was 25%. How did the GOP deal with this? Mostly by pretending it hadn't happened. Regarding the deficit, Matt Taibbi observed about the Tea Party:

Regarding Iraq, the line was pretty much that they went allin with AK preflop and hey, they didn't win, but it was a pretty reasonable play given the information. For example, the insufferable Megan McArdle wrote this insanely whiny piece in 2008, complaining that she was being treated like an architect of the war merely for supporting it (and having described opponents as "pathetic", "nuts" and "paranoiac" in the run-up):

The entire American Right has collective narcissism. They will never admit that things going badly wrong was their fault. A year after Trump is gone, it'll just be "well I mean looking back, Trump wasnt a Real Conservative, mistakes were made, can you stop going on and on about it? Can we talk about the fact that Sanctuary Cities are traitors to America?".

I do on balance think the GOP is in decline, but Trump is a symptom of that, not a cause. It's also going to be hard to break their stranglehold on the Senate.

PSA: If your last name starts with Mc, do not name your kid Megan/Meghan. Megan McArdle and Meghan McCain are in the top 5 most intolerable women in the media class.

Meh. You could have said the same about the dems and McGovern in 1972. I do agree that the Senate seems out of reach for the foreseeable future.

MM MD

Don't see the relevance of the dems of 1972?

Edit: Like I don't even understand the comparison you're making. Who are the Dems supposed to be analogous to in the modern day?

McGovern ran the party into a ditch in the 1972 elections pretty much as badly as Trump did in the midterms - Newsweek, Time and pretty much every newspaper in the US had stories where the thrust was "can the Democratic party survive?" As it turned out, they did OK.

Which the GOP may or may not do. We'll see.

MM MD