If past actions are indicative I have no doubts that as a party and as a political culture that Republicans are going to go through an even shorter period of reflection than the one brought on by the one two punch of W. Bush's era and the defeat of McCain by Obama.
There will be some very public and perhaps even some loud and genuine calls for the people with power and influence to truly reckon with an unleashed and rising Right Wing White Nationalist Fascist Authoritarian movement fueled by the paranoia, conspiracy theories, unfounded or ill targeted resentments and rejection of science, compromise, a pluralistic society, egalitarianism in any form and now the very legitimacy of elections that is precisely what the party itself has been selling to their constituents and the public st large for decades now.
There will be some tame public mea culpas from a few in power now. Louder ones from those so far removed from the circles of real influence we will all wonder why they even bothered. Reports and autopsies will be scrutinized and the usual topics of demographic change and outreach to people of color, non-Evangelical Christians, women the youth vote yadda-yadda...
And then the most Trumpist sounding voices will suck up the oxygen, push what is left of the moderates around so that they are not a factor, and the latest outrage from the deepest core of the social media whack job machine will be the next messianic/apocalyptic crusades the moron brigade will champion as a way to distract the base and the world from seeing just how rotten to the core the party is at this time and how easily it WILL fall into the hands of the shockingly incompetent and ignorant or the cynically manipulative or just the outright malevolent, yet again.
Because that is their 35 year or so track record and all of us, Democrat, principled and patriotic conservative, the newly "Woke" Progressive, the "A pox on both your houses" hipster Centrist, the "I'm too busy with more important things" non-politics person we all know... We let it happen before for a multitude of reasons that made sense at the time.
Not this time. We came so close.
And even in defeating these forces this time we endured so much loss.
And will endure more before it is over with.
When the Republican Party does what it always does and Conservatives do what they always do, turn inward and come out somehow worse than before after a defeat, we have to be clear headed and with spines of steel.
The majority of self identified Republicans/Conservatives have to stamp out this poison and return to reality before we start to treat them differently.
