I just hope that maybe with the death of the Boomers and Trump turning the RNC into a circus that is very much a minority with younger people that the republican party as we know it is not long for this world. Maybe the current democrats move into that spot, and someone a little further left will emerge.

If ours was a reasonably healthy system, I think that's exactly what would happen. And it wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened.

The problem though is that the Republicans - or more precisely their think tank advisers - recognize that that's the way things are headed, and the party is determined to stop it by any means possible, which basically boils down to undermining education and access to information to keep as much of the public as ignorant and misinformed as possible, and to destroy democratic institutions, discourage voting, gerrymander and expand the police state in order to counter those who will stubbornly end up opposing them anyway.

Broadly, there are three possible paths a party that's gotten to the point that it no longer represents the will of enough people to be a contender can follow. It can reform itself, it can allow itself to be eliminated and replaced, or it can arrange things so that people are conned or forced into supporting it anyway, in spite of the fact that it's really in almost nobody's interests to do that. And the Republicans have very obviously chosen the third path.

And our system is so broken that they might just succeed.