If moderate conservatives like Jeb Bush are unable to rescue the Republican Party from its own extremism, if Presidential nomination victories become consistently Pyrrhic and disqualifying, will we see the emergence of a more centrist conservative party? Or is the madness of the GOP just a cycling out that will ultimately run its course? Nobody can sum up the Republicans’ recent rocky road and the fork that led it to its precarious current position more eloquently than Louis Menand does this week in the opening of his New Yorker piece, “Money Pol.” An excerpt:

“Once, when winters were cold and the world seemed large, creatures roamed the earth who were permissive on social issues and at ease with big government, yet remained ever faithful to the gods of business and finance. Their principles were abstract but broad-minded: tolerance, free trade, and a belief in something called the American Way. Their personal tastes were conventional. They were surprisingly allergic to indecorum, and disinclined to question the status quo. But they were not small-town or provincial; they were Wall Streeters, not Main Streeters. Their vista was international. They were private-sector types who answered the call to public service. They were liberal Republicans. Nelson Rockefeller was such a creature. So were Prescott Bush, William Scranton, Charles Percy, John Lindsay, Mark Hatfield, Elliot Richardson, and George Romney.

Then, one year, a powerful meteor struck the planet, and, virtually overnight, the entire species was wiped out. The meteor’s name was Ronald Reagan. Political paleontologists, looking back at the fossil record, can detect signs pointing to the organism’s imminent extinction that predate the Reagan era. Richard Nixon, for example, showed that a pro-business, big-government Republican, by appealing to suburban anti-Communism and white working-class resentment, could take a populist road to the White House. Men like Rockefeller and Romney despised Nixon; but they could never beat him. Liberal Republicans did not like to get into the political mud.”

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Nelson Rockefeller, 1964: “The Republican Party must repudiate these people.”