This piece just came out, about demographic challenges to the GOP in a post-Boomer America, and it's got me thinking: it's not just about demographics, it's about living after the Cold War, and the slowly unfolding effects of that victory.

The GOP has never gotten over their victory over Communism in 1989; they suffer from a kind of triumphant melancholia, endlessly recapitulating the victory in their souls, repeating it under their breath.  (The degree to which the GOP is responsible for this victory is debatable, but ideologically, it was their victory.)  

Now that that victory has been fully metabolized, and people (esp under 40) are beginning to appreciate a "socialism" innocent of the stigma of Leninist-Stalinist-Brezhnevian totalitarianism, and have begun to tire of the tub-thumping hyper-capitalism of financial elites, the GOP discovers that an agenda based on a war won a half-century ago holds little appeal to a rising America.  

All they have left is an increasingly geriatric white grievance.  But the racial and ethnic demographics of this new electorate make it ever harder to fool enough white people into support for plutocracy.  So now we are in the final stages of this party's efforts, which increasingly amount to an expressly anti-democratic effort at hampering democracy by curtailing voting rights.  (The appeal to packing the judiciary is effectively a part of this strategy.)  

It can work for a while, but unless they figure out a way to include new populations in their white grievance strategy (which is not impossible, but there are few signs of that emerging yet), it will eventually fail.  The longer they stave off the collapse, the more total it will be when it comes.