Everyone says the transformation of Senator Arlen Specter from a Republican to a Democrat represents the frustration of a political moderate in an arch-conservative party. This misses the point, because there is nothing moderate about Arlen Specter’s political beliefs. Like Joe Lieberman, he has reserved for himself the right to vote his conscience, which means he will hardly be a staunch Democrat in favor of workers rights against corporate interests, or even in favor of President Obama’s Supreme Court nominees. What Arlen Specter does have, along with Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and a few other Republicans, is a last little shred of sanity and rationality. These people are not at home in a party that is suffering from mass delusions.

We also hear that the Republican Party is shrinking into a Southern redoubt as a marginalized, regional party. This is true, but something much more interesting is going on here. We are watching a major national political party disappear from the American scene. The Republicans are in their Cheshire Cat phase – all that is left to see are the inane grins of politicians who have lost all connection to the real world. They wear the rictus of a doomed and dying political force that is paying the price for decades of hypocrisy and deceit. They have peddled the elixir of deception for so long that they have begun to drink heavily from their own product, and now it is too late. There are barely any Republican politicians on the national scene who are not irrevocably disconnected from reality.

This has been a long time in coming. It might have begun during the 20 years of exile when Roosevelt and Truman held the White House, and the Republicans had nothing to offer the American people. They discovered they could engineer a comeback by selling fear – fear of the Commies and the Red Menace. Fear brought votes and power, and it helped even more if you could generate fear of internal enemies – fifth columns of traitors working to deliver America into the hands of the Kremlin.

Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign against Commie traitors in our midst was the first real political witch hunt in 20th century American politics. The traitors weren’t just Communist sympathizers or soi-disant members of the Communist Party, they were intellectuals, fellow-travelers, and – most interestingly – homosexuals. Senator McCarthy wrapped all this up in one descriptor – “pinkos”. What was interesting about this pogrom of government pinkos was that McCarthy’s aide-de-camp was a lawyer who was himself a closeted homosexual. Roy Cohn certainly knew where to find hidden homosexuals in the federal government – they went to the same bars and cocktail parties he did.

And so the hypocrisy began. Do what I say and pay no attention to what I do. Senator McCarthy’s counterpart in the House was the young California congressman Richard Nixon, who internalized all the wrong lessons from the hysteria he and McCarthy stoked up. The darkness of Nixon’s soul compelled him to see enemies all around, and not just Communist sympathizers. There were liberals and Jew lovers and Harvard educated snobs and phony union leaders who pilfered union dues to live in luxury; these people needed to be watched and could never be trusted. By the time Nixon reached the presidency, he had the tools to do just that, and if the CIA and FBI wouldn’t accede to his demands for illegal spying on Americans, Nixon had the Republican National Committee to do it for him.

Hypocrisy took what appeared to be a harmless turn under Ronald Reagan, who had a habit of saying preposterous things like trees cause pollution. He also campaigned as a moral crusader, when his personal family situation was classically dysfunctional. Some of his children sided with his first wife and wouldn’t even speak to Ronald or Nancy Reagan. Reagan had a collection of favorite stories he would tell on the campaign trail, like the one about the welfare queen who would cash her welfare checks every month driving up in a Cadillac. These stories simply weren’t true; they were urban myths that fostered class and racial resentments. They cemented yet again the doctrine of “do as I say, not as I do.”

We now know Reagan was showing early signs of senility even before he became president. When Reagan was near the end of his second term, he had advanced to first-stage Alzheimer’s. He needed cue cards and stage directions for even the simplest functions, and it’s no wonder people like his vice president George Bush, or administration officials like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, developed the attitude that there was a hidden government behind the public façade of governance. Reality, in other words, was to be kept behind a curtain.

As president, George Bush pere furthered the illusion by pardoning all eleven convicted felons involved in the Iran-Contra affair, including the former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. The message was that those who operated a parallel government and broke laws in the process would suffer no penalties. The lessons of Watergate – that no man is above the law – were completely overthrown in the Iran-Contra scandal, but even at this stage there was still hope for the Republicans. Reagan at the start of the scandal said “we do not trade arms for hostages,” but by the end he had to admit on national television that the United States did indeed trade arms for hostages, but he as president didn’t know about it.

It was left to the administration of George Bush fils to complete the disconnect from reality, by operating under the belief it could create its own realities. “Intelligence” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction would be manufactured out of thin air. False allegations that he had ties to Osama bin Laden would be extracted by torture, while the president would insist all along “we don’t torture.” Orwellian double-speak became the favorite method of communicating with the public, as seen in Bush’s actions to gut environmental protection laws by introducing regulations with such titles as the “Clear Skies Act” and the “Healthy Forests Initiative.”

The Republicans in Congress eagerly went along with everything Bush proposed and did. It didn’t bother them that they were forced to disavow everything they said and stood for in the 1990s when Clinton was president. Back then fiscal deficits were horrors and big government was anathema to decent Republican conservatives. Under Bush, record-breaking deficits were embraced and defended vigorously as necessary for the security of the country, while expansion of federal government programs run by Homeland Security and the Department of Defense was seen as a sign of good government. One of the most remarkable things to observe about the Republicans now that Barack Obama is president is how quickly they have gone back to deriding big government and deficit spending, as if the entire eight years of the Bush administration never occurred.

This is a party that isn’t merely trying to erase the past; it honestly does not recognize it had anything to do with the Bush administration. Republicans have retreated to the 1990s and the glorified days of Reagan in the 1980s. They have stepped up the class and racial warfare to levels so absurd and unbelievable that no one is paying attention to them. Calling Obama a Magic Negro or a socialist or a Communist doesn’t frighten the public because the words are meaningless, and Americans have learned what real fright is having lived through eight years of the Bush administration.

With Arlen Specter’s departure, we now have prominent Republicans like Senator Jim DeMint saying this is proof that the party is ready for a resurgence of public support. He thinks losing a senator from a large northern state is a positive thing, and the intellectual stalwarts of the party such as Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh are urging Specter to take RINOS like John McCain, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe with him (a RINO is a Republican in Name Only).

This is a very odd spectacle. You would think that a party that has lost the White House, Senate, House of Representatives, plus multiple governorships and state legislatures would seek a way back from the political wilderness. Instead, the Republicans are folding up their big tent and eagerly embracing oblivion. Senator DeMint has said this week he would rather have 30 senators who are true to the Republican cause than 60 who are wavering in their political principles.

Some Republicans are fighting back. Putative party leader John McCain, oratorical disaster Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, and dynastic standard-bearer Jeb Bush have formed something called the National Council for a New America. They are joined by Republican Congressional leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boener in hosting a series of town hall meetings designed to listen to Americans and their concerns in order to re-brand the Republican Party.

There are two problems with this. As John McCain well knows, the people who attend Republican town hall meetings – the rank and file of the Republican Party – are the disaffected and marginalized middle class – almost exclusively white – who respond to the Republican fear-mongering. These are the people who are afraid of immigrants, who think liberals are traitors who should be swinging from lampposts, who believe the left has destroyed the moral fiber of this country, and who have a profound distrust of government. Because they are the base of the Republican Party, their own disaffected and marginalized status has come to define the position of the party in this country.

The second problem has to do with re-branding the party into some other image. Republican leaders don’t recognize that George W. Bush destroyed the brand. It is permanently identified with incompetence, corruption, religious fanaticism, crony capitalism, deficit spending, and the utter abandonment of the people’s constitutional rights. The realization is slowly sinking into the national consciousness that Republicans should never, ever be allowed to wield political power at any level lest they bring even further ruination to the country.

You can expect the National Council for a New America to fade into oblivion, as the Republican Party does the same. In this sense, Republicans like John McCain and Jeb Bush are just as delusional as any of their colleagues, because they don’t see that the people who now identify with and vote Republican blind themselves to reality just as they blind themselves to the failings of their own party. These people now number less than a quarter of the national electorate, yet they represent 100% of those who vote in Republican primaries, and what they want is purity rather than power. They want those who represent them to be as righteous and delusional as they are, and they don’t care if their candidate loses in the general election. The majority of their representatives still in Congress believe the same.

Worse still, it is not just Republicanism which is now branded a total failure, it is conservatism itself which has failed. Democrats may or may not identify themselves as liberals, but almost all Republicans identify themselves as conservatives. This might be why they are left holding nothing but delusions; if they looked deeply into their soul they would see nothing there to offer. Limited government, deregulation of markets, corporate welfare, a refusal to tax so as to balance a budget, and an unbridled defense establishment are what conservatism has offered. The failure has been monumental and quite likely brought to an end the position of the United States as the world’s sole great power.

This is what makes it so very difficult for a shining knight to arise and rebuild the Republican Party. There are no building blocks left to use as a foundation. It is a party utterly bereft of useful ideas, with a public identity as an organization destined continually to fail in governance because it lacks faith in governance. It cannot be trusted with power because it does not think or operate capably in the real world.

The critical question, therefore, is not how will the Republican Party make a comeback, but what will take its place. What will happen with the 20% of Americans who are living in a fantasy world where the rest of America are their mortal enemies out to deprive them of their livelihood, their homes, and their safety? What will happen with the corporations who still wield immense power but haven’t the Republicans around to do their bidding? What will happen with the religious extremists who expect the Republicans to save this country from moral decay?

These are forces for potential disruption and even danger to America. They need to be brought back into the body politic, given a voice, but like everyone else they should be expected to operate in the real world where compromises are required and where we all can agree on what is up and what is down. Under the best of circumstances, this new political party will offer ideas and policies that counterbalance those of the Democrats, and at some point its candidates will be rewarded national office once voters can trust in their competence and sanity. This new political party might be called Republican, though the odds from a marketing standpoint are against that, but every American will be able to sigh with relief that is completely unlike today’s Republican Party in every way possible.