"The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing," observes Paul Krugman this morning. "And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming....
"It’s hard to see how this situation is resolved without a major crisis of some kind."
I'd argue that we're in the crisis now; we have been for years -- our original pathogen being the Reagan administration's acute fiscal irrationality, which has since transformed into chronic obliviousness.
But that point is scarcely controversial, hardly even debatable. So the real question is, How will this prolonged crisis end?
My guess -- no better or worse than any, I suppose -- is that if the GOP's wingnut wing persists in its internal dominance, the party's genuine conservatives will someday organize a Conservative Party that will almost instantly constitute less a third party than the second of two major parties (the GOP will itself slip into third-party status).
These conservatives will represent, as did the GOP before losing its mind, the center right; thus they will have, potentially, a preformed base of a whopping three-fourths of the American electorate (about 35 percent of whom consistently self-identify as ideologically moderate, 40 percent as conservative).
The practical mechanics of such an invention are of course hugely difficult to achieve. What's even harder, though, is to imagine today's hugely irresponsible and prime-demographics-hemorrhaging GOP sustaining itself another decade or two as a major political player.