Shell-shocked Republicans remain in denial, their shattered dreams gone with the wind

OPINION: The Republican Party is heading towards extinction after the crushing defeat of Mitt Romney in the US presidential election

My college roommates and I used to grocery shop and cook together. The only food we seemed to agree on was corn, so we ate a lot of corn.

My mom would periodically call to warn me in a dire tone, “Do you know why the Incas are extinct?” Her maize hazing left me with a deeply ingrained fear of being part of a civilisation that was obliviously engaging in behaviour that would lead to its extinction.

Too bad the Republican Party didn’t have my mom to keep it on its toes. Then it might not have gone all Apocalypto on us – becoming the first civilisation in modern history to spiral the way of the Incas, Aztecs and Mayans.

Vanishing tribe

The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the GOP universe of arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys.

Just another vanishing tribe that fought the cultural and demographic tides of history.

Someday it will be the sub- ject of a National Geographic special, or a Mel Gibson movie, where archaeologists piece together who the lost tribe was, where it came from and what happened to it.

Republican ruins

The experts will sift through the ruins of the Reagan Presidential Library, Dick Cheney’s shotgun casings, Orca poll monitoring hieroglyphics, remnants of triumphal rants by Dick Morris on Fox News, faded photos of Clint Eastwood and an empty chair and scraps of ancient tape in which a tall, stiff man, his name long forgotten, gnashes his teeth about the 47 per cent of moochers and the “gifts” they got.

Instead of smallpox, plagues, drought and conquistadors, the Republican decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female people and gay people count.

As historian Will Durant observed, “A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” President Barack Obama’s victory margin is expanding, as more votes are counted. He didn’t just beat Mitt Romney: he’s still beating him. But another sign of the old guard’s denial came last Friday, a month after the election, when the Romney campaign ebulliently announced it had raised $85.9 million (€66.4 million) in the final weeks of the campaign, making its fundraising effort “the most successful in Republican Party history”.

Why is the Romney campaign still boasting? You can’t celebrate at a funeral. Go away and learn how to crunch data on the internet.