As it lies prostrate and dying in the gutter, the modern GOP is suffering the final indignity of being on the business end of a golden shower from a creepy, orange clown who needs to drain the overflow of too many Diet Cokes.

Had it not been protected emotionally by the echo chamber of Fox News and practically by gerrymandering, perhaps the Republican Party would have experienced a corrective comeuppance years ago and not continued to career toward annihilation. The government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 were just such a Waterloo for Newt and other nuts, forcing some sanity into the party.

Eight months after that second power play failed, Fox News was born. Perhaps not coincidentally, compromise hasn’t been on the table ever since nor has there been a true path to the Republican nomination for those unable to pass a conservative purity test that’s poison in the general election. Now it’s too late for this iteration of the former Party of Lincoln. It must start at the bottom and conduct a real rebuild, and not just in a small, surface way. It needs to go big or it may as well go home.

The ascent of Trump has come as a shock to some among the faithful who somehow didn’t get the memo, even after the Tea Party and Birtherism, that the GOP has spent half a century pandering to racists, stoking Angry White Man disease, a profitable business but also a costly one.

From Molly Ball’s Atlantic piece on health-care wonk Avik Roy and other disenfranchised Republicans:

In the real world, Donald Trump was running on a platform directly opposed to the pro-trade, pro-immigration, pro-small-government ideology of conservatives like Roy. Many of those at the Hoover gathering, Roy included, feared they would not have a party to come back to post-Trump. They are among a class of conservative operatives, thinkers, and staffers who have spent the campaign season adrift, pondering the causes of their party’s disruption and looking nervously to the future. Fifty Republican national-security experts signed an open letter declaring Trump a danger to the republic; several staffers quit the Republican National Committee rather than work to elect Trump. Allegiances have been sundered, and professional trajectories thrown into confusion. One former top RNC staffer told me he no longer speaks to his once-close colleagues; a conservative policy expert who runs a think tank in Washington, D.C., says he’s become adept at steering conversations away from politics and toward college football. Several Republicans I know, finding the campaign intolerable, have rediscovered old hobbies.

Of the various explanations that have been advanced in such quarters to explain Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP, Roy’s may be the most explosive. Although he was originally drawn to the party for its emphasis on economic freedom and self-reliance, he now believes that a substantial portion of Republicans were never motivated by those ideas. Rather than a conservative party that happens to incorporate cultural grievances, today’s GOP is, in his view, a vehicle for the racial resentment, nationalism, and nostalgia of older white voters. The element of the party that he once dismissed as a fringe, in other words, now seems to form its core.•