GAMADES: Republican Party bound to implode

Not to sound arrogant, but some friends and I predicted the death of the Republican Party when we were in high school. We were 17 and naïve, but loud enough that the couple in the booth behind us at this modest taco joint in our conservative hometown moved tables. Our reasoning wasn’t correct — we pinpointed the downfall of the party on social conservatism, not the rise of a demagogue reality TV star, but here we are.

Super Tuesday has come and gone, and Republican candidate Donald Trump still has a commanding delegate lead in the Republican presidential primary. The path to beating him is getting progressively narrower, especially since there are still so many candidates left in the race. Now, the strategy seems to be to keep everyone in, hoping to split enough delegates to keep Trump from hitting the magic number needed for the nomination. The GOP is in full-blown panic mode.

There’s Chris Christie, staring into the Trump void, knowing full well he’s sold his soul to the devil but soldiering on, probably in hopes of earning a position in a hypothetical Trump administration. Then we have House Speaker Paul Ryan, who sternly shut down Trump’s comments about the Ku Klux Klan — without mentioning him by name, according to The Washington Post — but weakly added that he’d “support the [GOP] nominee.” There are some party notables who insist on rolling out an alternative nominee if Trump were to win, and some who fear that would just wrap up the presidency for the Democrats with a neat little bow.

In other words, the Republican Party is very close to an implosion. Even if this race manages to go to a brokered convention, it should by no means be a sigh of relief for the GOP. Stretching out this ugly nominating contest until July leaves little time for the party to make nice with itself and unify before having to face off against Clinton or Sanders.

A brokered convention hasn’t occurred since 1952, when the Democratic Party nominated Adlai Stevenson, according to CNN. In case you aren’t familiar with the term, a brokered convention means the delegates will be released from the candidate that took them on the first ballot. They are then allowed to switch to another candidate upon the next balloting. So if Donald Trump does not win the required 1,237 delegates on the first go-around, the delegates could freely change their vote to somebody like the Republicans’ forced golden boy, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

Or could they? Trump, at least so far, is winning by sizable margins, and picking another, less popular candidate through dirty politics and fine print would leave the party scrambling to keep loyalty. You can bet Trump would not let that one go easily. And his effectiveness rests in creating angry uproars about politics as they are.

Republicans are stuck between a rock and Trump Tower. If he wins, it’s a disaster. If he wins but does not get enough delegates, it’s a disaster. It’s a pretty safe bet that the Republican National Convention would not select Trump as its nominee, but that’s going to open the door to another long train of bitter problems in the party that will last until at least July.

Long gone are the days of varsity Republicans like former President George W. Bush and former presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney. Former Republican candidate Jeb Bush was probably the closest thing this race had to a varsity Republican, and since dropping out is, as illustrated by his Snapchat and reported by Gawker, “doing better than ever or has finally lost it.”

What this is all pointing to, it seems, is the end of Republican Party’s influence as it stands today. Or, as Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post theorizes, “the end of political parties as we currently think of them.” He has a point. 2016 has been the year of anti-establishment rancor on both sides. People certainly seem to be sick of the current system. The problem is, changing the U.S. political parties wouldn’t change the U.S. political system.

Not to mention the fact that on the path we’re on, American ideologies are being stretched further to the right and left, so this is all probably going to get worse before it gets better. But who knows? If we truly are experiencing a shift in the party system, it’s going to be pretty hard to predict where we end up next. Journalists are still kicking themselves for underestimating the Trump phenomenon.

Is the GOP going to go the way of the Whigs? Probably, at least in some sense. It can’t hold up for much longer by eating itself to survive. What happens next? Well, we might as well ask some liberal teenagers at a taco shop in Texas.