A more extremist Republican party?

The Republican nomination fight matters, we're told, because the future of the Republican party depends on what kind of nominee loses to Obama this November. If it's a nutjob from the Santorum / Bachmann / Paul mold, defeat will discredit the crazies and move the party back to the center; if a moderate gets nominated and then loses in November, the crazies will claim vindication and the party will become even more extremist (more here).

The problem is that the latter scenario is more likely. Despite this week's upset, Romney will almost certainly be the nominee; and while he embodies the evil and cruelty of the financial parasite class, by Republican standards he's sane and moderate enough to have already incurred the profound suspicion of the troglodyte / fundie base. And while nothing is certain in politics, he's almost sure to lose to Obama, possibly in a landslide.

So by this time next year, we may indeed be seeing the Republican party renouncing what moderation it now retains and becoming even more extremist.

But seeing the Republican party as it already is, the mind boggles to contemplate what that would actually consist of. I mean, what exactly could they do to become even more extremist than they already are? Will they want public schools to teach that the Earth is just 60 years old, not 6,000, and that anyone who claims to remember events earlier than that is deceived by Satan? Will the next "personhood" bill declare that life begins at the moment the rapist gets his pants unzipped? Will the next wave of "anti-voter- fraud" laws cut out all the obfuscating detail and just require you to provide proof that you aren't black? Will they push to execute scientists for stem-cell research? Completely exempt millionaires from all taxes? Revoke the citizenship of atheists and anyone with a college degree? Nominate Fred Phelps for President?

My point is, they're already halfway over the shark, in terms of what a political party can be and still remain viable in a modern nation. If they go much further, whatever the details turn out to look like, then the remaining sane members, the McCains and Frums and Christies and Snowes, will either be purged or give up and quit -- they'll either become a new economic-conservative wing of the Democrats, or form a third party and vanish into irrelevance. The remnant Republican party will be a broken instrument in the hands of the financial parasite class, who will find that fixing or replacing it is beyond even their powers.

If we can just get through this next election, it may be the last one that needs to be fought under the present circumstances -- the contradictions and rancor within conservatism may finally blow it apart into its constituent sub-movements, some of which we can do business with when they're no longer locked in coalition with the lunatics. If the Republican party implodes, then given the logistical difficulty of creating a viable new national party in such a huge country, the US could even become a de facto one-party state for a while. If so, the financial parasite class will redouble its efforts to dominate the Democratic party. The real battle of 2016 may be to nominate Warren or someone like her, and to elect a Congress with the same spirit, to take the bastards down once and for all.