It didn't even become competitive after Rubio. There's no constituency for a candidate who looks willing to compromise. For the non-populists, the aim is to cleave to strict doctrine on any policy. For the populists, it is whatever captures the tv or twitter soundbite.
I think we have a new GOP and the new GOP will want a new establishment.
No Republican will be foolish enough to ignore the party's protectionist, anti-immigrant, racially sceptical id after Trump. Disrupting the operation of the Senate as Cruz has done will become the new pathway for the ambitious.
Conservatism will occupy a space even further to the right on the political spectrum. As if far, far right wing puritanism or populism can cure the problems created by their far right progenitors. Rather than exacerbating them.
Is this how America ends? Or will the elastic of compromise reassert itself in the GOP one day?
There's a sort of nostalgia abroad. It thinks a whiter, more America-centric model will return the US to its pre-eminence.
But the exceptionalism of post-War America cannot be recreated because it emerged from a world in which all of the US' competitors were in ruins. Now that sort of enormous pre-eminence just ain't available. The world's wealth flows up the estuaries of many a great city. Many of them lie beyond the borders of the USA.
Maybe Republican extremism is an expression of a country railing against its decline.
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