The GOP Should Die, But Probably Won't

The title of my post might seem aggressive, but not much more so than the conclusion of Avik Roy.  Roy is one of the GOP's leading lights on healthcare policy and (of course) an opponent of "Obamacare", in addition to being an editor at Forbes (no liberal rag, that).  Below is the first quote that I find amazing to read from a conservative:

“Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 was a historical disaster for the conservative movement,” Roy tells me, “because for the ensuing decades, it identified Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party opposed to civil rights.”

 Here is the second:

“Conservative intellectuals, and conservative politicians, have been in kind of a bubble,” Roy says. “We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism — philosophical, economic conservatism. In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”

These two quotes taken together, when added to the ascent of Donald Trump to be the GOP's nominee for president, and the support of significant portions of that party's establishment, are why I come to the conclusion that the GOP as a party should die.  A party that has chosen as its standard bearer a man who has espoused racist, xenophobic and misogynistic views for the entirety of race for the presidential nomination in a country built by immigrants, much less one that is currently becoming browner with each passing year is unfit to lead it.  Whatever validity conservatism as a movement might have, whether it be in the fiscal realm or the values realm, is completely undermined by the choice of a presidential candidate who both in his business dealings and in his treatment of marriage as an institution has demonstrated no respect at all for those aspects of conservatism throughout his life.

Having discussed the "should" of my title, I shift now to the "won't".  While the GOP since George W. Bush has failed to re-take the White House (and will likely fail yet again despite the weakness of Hillary Clinton as a candidate), absent a shift in the electorate not seen in at least a decade, the GOP will control the governor's mansion and state legislatures in 23 states.  Those of you who follow such things in the news will not be surprised to find a high degree of overlap between these 23 states and those who have passed laws restricting the access of people of color to the ballot box with Voter ID laws or opted not to expand Medicaid access for their poorer citizens.  In both cases, those impacted by such laws are as likely (if not more than likely) to be people of color.  So as much as we might rail against the latest offense Trump's mouth has perpetrated against a minority group or other marginalized group in American society, in a significant portion of this country, the GOP view of how a state should be run is accepted by the voting public.