The GOP needs radical surgery to restore its honor--and its Presidential aspirations

America needs a major conservative party along the lines of what the GOP was like before it sold its soul to get all those racist Southern Dixiecrats--the kind of people who now call themselves Tea Partiers and claim that their concerns are strictly fiscal.

We need a conservative party because at least a third of Americans are conservative by nature, just as around a third are liberal by nature, and another third are moderate pragmatics by nature. For a many years the two major parties were either liberal-leaning or conservative-leaning, with their beliefs moderated by the compromises needed to attract enough moderates to win elections.

But today the Republican Party has abandoned that tack. It has become an extremist organization that wins through extremist demagoguery and a string of ever-dirtier vote-rigging tricks--radical gerrymandering, voter suppression (especially black voters), abuse of the Senate rules, lavishly funded propaganda campaigns aimed at not just defeating Democrats but at fostering fundamental hatred and distrust of the federal government.

The consequence is that today's Republican Party is no longer conservative--it's reactionary, dominated by aging Southern white revanchists still fighting the Civil War, still hating the federal government for the same reasons they hated it in 1861.

The only way we'll get a real conservative party again is through the reduction of this GOP to a regional party. Its Southern white base is so radicalized they can't be reasoned into the 21st century, and their gerrymandered grip on their House seats is so strong they can't be defeated in their rural redoubts--at least not until America's demographic shifts shrink these redoubts to the point that they can't command a House majority. Such a party won't be able to elect presidents--or shape the Supreme Court as a consequence. Or get a Senate majority.

Only when it becomes clear that a Tea Party-dominated GOP can't elect a president will moderate conservatives have a shot at getting their party back.