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[Trekkin]

Could this see the collapse of the party if they don't succeed?

Well, hypothetically anything could, but frankly I don't think it particularly likely, at least for the commonly understood idea of "collapse."

For one thing, it's critical to keep in mind that Congress acts nationally but its members are elected at the state level, and plenty of states are so deep red that the RNC is essentially superfluous. Alabama, for example, will keep on electing conservative candidates to its state offices no matter what happens; they could be Republicans or The $$ U.S.A. Flag Eagle $$ Conservatives or lizard people from Mars and they'd still get elected in a landslide so long as they promised not to be a damn dirty godless liberal commie. No matter what happens to McConnell and Ryan and Meadows and Cruz, there will still be a roster of state-level politicians with which to populate a conservative primary -- so in that sense, the Republicans will live on even if the Republican party does not, and whatever successor they have will probably keep much of the same platform. There will also be enough ultra-capitalists disaffected with their treatment at the hands of the Democrats to fund them.

In that sense, then, all the elements of a short-to-mid-term successful Republican-like party are in place: people, votes, and money. More likely than an outright collapse is a very public and bloody changing of the guard, with various high-profile Republicans stripped of things like speakerships and majority leaderships and leadership of the RNC and held up as "the Republicans behind Trump". The Meadows/Cruz wing of the party may veer hard right to pick up legitimately crazy donors like the Mercers and force the rank-and-file to reform under their banner; it's a dead end strategy, but one they can milk for years. Impeachment would almost certainly be part of that process, particularly since Pence's evangelical appeal can help direct most of the fallout from that process at the moderates in the party.

They are, in that case, doomed: their most natural inclination is to swing older, whiter, and grumpier, which only works so long as those people stay alive, since demographics suggest they will be impossible to replace. However, the gigantic, collapse-looking paradigm shift leftward won't happen in that event until the Boomers die out.

[Zangi]

Party has already collapsed. They're just so good at denying reality that they're still managing to maintain themselves.

Reality will only hit them if they lose a buncha elections by a landslide.  Anything else will confirm their convictions.

[MorleyDev]

I feel like we've been here before. Haven't we been here before?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Nothing is certain until the bill goes to a vote or is dismissed, but it doesn't look good. Still, senators have taken explicit bribes before and senators have claimed they utterly oppose a bill but vote for it anyway.

McCain has a modicum of trust from me after his last stunt and considering that the Republicans are shifting towards a "hurry up and die so we can replace you with a good little puppet" narrative regarding him, but it's still possible he could turn until the moment he says no.

They're actually not even at 49-51, though, because Rand Paul and a few of the Kill The Poors squad are also against this bill for being too humane again. So it doesn't look good even if one of the dissenters returns to the fold.

[sluissa]

Rand Paul is such a weird little being. This is as close to full repeal as you're likely to get. Part of me feels he might be more moderate but just coming up with libertarian excuses because that's what he was voted in on. But maybe I'm trying to see order in chaos.

[Reelya]

They are, in that case, doomed: their most natural inclination is to swing older, whiter, and grumpier, which only works so long as those people stay alive, since demographics suggest they will be impossible to replace. However, the gigantic, collapse-looking paradigm shift leftward won't happen in that event until the Boomers die out.

I wouldn't count on that. I'm pretty sure that they were waiting for the "squares" to die out since the 1950s/60s.

There's also a fact that some people just seek political power, and if the ranks of Republicans thin out, then suddenly that's an easier path to power than the more "popular" party which everyone will want to join. e.g. black conservatives in the Republican Party can become bigger names much quicker and easier than if they became Democrats. While the Democrats are more pro-black people, it's also saturated so that any individual black activist has a very small chance of making a name for themselves.

The Republicans will easily realign if the elderly start dying. The rural / urban divide isn't going anywhere, neither is the college/non-college divide.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/07/health/millennials-conservative-generations/index.html

The young adults, who were born between 1980 and 1994, are currently more politically polarized than Generation Xers and Baby Boomers, according to the paper, which was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin on Wednesday.

Additionally, millennials are more likely to identify as conservative than either Generation Xers or Baby Boomers were at the same age, said Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University and lead author of the paper.

So yeah, conservatives aren't going anywhere. Sure, some things supported by the Republicans in the past aren't going to be the future, but neither party ever had a problem jettisoning previously supported policies which became broadly unacceptable.

[Trekkin]

That's how they identify themselves, though, not necessarily what their policies are relative to what's currently thought of as moderate. It may be that even self-labeled conservative millennials are pro-choice, for example.

And my point, Reelya, was that the closest to a collapse we're likely to see is an ideological realignment, because, as you say, political parties are adept at that. The "They" there referred specifically to Meadows/Cruz/whatever the Freedom Caucus becomes after all this is over.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Yeah, the analysis of actual policy beliefs instead of more vague ideological labels puts most of what we think of as "conservative" on a death timer. There will be a new sense of what's "conservative" brought up by the current dissident faction of the Republicans, who have few representatives but a lot of young base to work with. It should be noted that the average person is pretty much constantly drifting leftward over their lifespan, it's just that a new generation tends to make massive jumps leftward and turns them into "conservatives" in the same timeframe.

Which might be best. I don't want a one-party Democratic state so much as I want the Republicans to get their crazy nodules drained and start cooperating with the real world. If they do, it'll keep going back and forth. If they don't, then you'll have a risk of the Permanent Democratic Majority until the dissidents finally topple the Monolith of Reagan.

Or we'll hit AI God and politics will become an obsolete field, one of those.

[Dunamisdeos]

Prediction: About half of you will be the new conservatives when your kids start being more free than you'd like with [future social actions] and start campaigning for [future social change] that make you uncomfortable.

This is based on past data from every generation of humans to ever exist in history, ever.

[redwallzyl]

Prediction: About half of you will be the new conservatives when your kids start being more free than you'd like with [future social actions] and start campaigning for [future social change] that make you uncomfortable.

This is based on past data from every generation of humans to ever exist in history, ever.

At least hopefully they will be actual conservatives by then and not the mutant abomination of neoliberalism, corporate corruption and naked power grabbing it is now. then we can have sane discourse and actually do shit.

[Reelya]

Prediction: About half of you will be the new conservatives when your kids start being more free than you'd like with [future social actions] and start campaigning for [future social change] that make you uncomfortable.

This is based on past data from every generation of humans to ever exist in history, ever.

Half of that is correct. The use of the term "conservative" sort of implies a particular direction on the left/right scale. And we can't really assume that, necessarily.

 e.g. d'ya really think the old-timers thought the Hitler Youth were too liberal? It swings back and forth. Sure, future generations will believe things we find unconscionable, and find our views old-fashioned and stuck in the mud. But we absolutely cannot claim that this future is going to be closer to some socialist ideal. That's drawing too many conclusions about mine or your ideal world. And the whole point is that whatever ideals we have will be obsolete. The future generations are sure to surprise us as we cannot assume it's going to be in a "more liberal direction" where we define what's liberal. It's an oxymoron to do so.

e.g. say that future young people think nothing of having corporate invasion into every point in their lives, and they think us old-timers who have a lefty anti-coporate thing are old fogeys who don't get it. In that sense, the Occupy Wall Street viewpoint becomes the "conservative" view, and fully embracing corporate branding on every facet of your life becomes the modern / "progressive" viewpoint.

[sluissa]

Prediction: About half of you will be the new conservatives when your kids start being more free than you'd like with [future social actions] and start campaigning for [future social change] that make you uncomfortable.

This is based on past data from every generation of humans to ever exist in history, ever.

Half of that is correct. e.g. d'ya really think the old-timers thought the Hitler Youth were too liberal? It swings back and forth. Sure, future generations will believe things we find unconscionable, and find our views old-fashioned and stuck in the mud. But we absolutely cannot claim that this future is going to be closer to some socialist ideal. That's drawing too many conclusions about mine or your ideal world. And the whole point is that whatever ideals we have will be obsolete. The future generations are sure to surprise us as we cannot assume it's going to be in a "more liberal direction" where we define what's liberal. It's an oxymoron to do so.

e.g. say that future young people think nothing of having corporate invasion into every point in their lives, and they think us old-timers who have a lefty anti-coporate thing are old fogeys who don't get it. In that sense, the Occupy Wall Street viewpoint becomes the "conservative" view, and fully embracing corporate branding on every facet of your life becomes the modern / "progressive" viewpoint.

That may be true but with that Hitler Youth example alone it may be that extreme situations (hyperinflation, starvation, economic failure, governmental collapse, war) lead to situations that don't fit within pattern.

[Reelya]

You can also make the same claim about liberal youth protests. That comes and goes, and is often in response to events, e.g. the 1960s vietnam thing.

It's certainly not a universal law that young people form protest groups asking for more left-wing politics. It's true of some places and times and not others. For example in places with a socialist command economy you're more likely to see youth sentiment wanting capitalism.

It could also be a case of extrapolating trends too far. e.g. violent crime increase rapidly from the 1970s to the 1990s, so the general consensus was that young people were becoming more violent because of violent media. However, the trend just stopped by itself despite the ever-increasing amount of violent media and porn available via the internet in the 1990s. Similarly, we've seen left-wing student uprisings in capitalist nations, since the 1960s, so we assume left-wing student uprisings are a universal force of human nature, and that if we go to the left, the student uprisings will just continue to go further to the left. We don't have a great data set for that. Sure, there were social movements before WWII, but very few of them had young people as their leaders. e.g. the typical Suffragette was a housewife, not a schoolgirl.

The idea that young people have campaigned for liberal changes since the "beginning of time" isn't actually a well supported idea. Children can easily be more zealous and murderous than adults, see the Children's Crusade. Young people are more hot-headed and passionate, but they can also more easily be led down the wrong path, which doesn't equate to swinging either way in politics.

[Lord Shonus]

There is an extremely visible oscillation between "liberal" and "conservative" dominance in the body politic. Much of this is classical thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic. Starting post-War (due to the radical realignments that sprung up from the Depression), the staid mid-forties to late fifties icons of American conservatism gave way to the flower children of the sixties to mid seventies, which gave way to the conservative Eighties, which lead to the freewheeling nineties, to the conservative resurgence of the turn of the century.

In a real sense, many of the problems we're facing today come from the increasing rapidity of this cycle. In the past, we usually stayed one course long enough for the ideas to get played out, but also to have the good parts of the philosophies engraved in the body politic. Nowadays, social change is coming so swift that we don't have time to form a proper synthesis - we just have thesis and antithesis switching places rapidly and smashing each other with rocks.

[RedKing]

Prediction: About half of you will be the new conservatives when your kids start being more free than you'd like with [future social actions] and start campaigning for [future social change] that make you uncomfortable.

This is based on past data from every generation of humans to ever exist in history, ever.

Anecdotal data (i.e. myself) would disagree. I'm more Left now than I've ever been. At this rate I'll be a 60-year old Maoist rebel.