As my colleague Jonah Goldberg notes, the Left and some of the Right has long been waiting for a “conservative crack-up,” first predicted by R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. of The American Spectator . . . a generation ago. I am a middle-aged man with more grey in my beard than I would really like to see in the morning, but I was a high-school boy when Mr. Tyrell wrote that book.

These crack-ups are an awful long time coming.

If you spend very much time reading the Left’s advocacy journalism — as I do, for my sins — then you are accustomed to seeing headlines about the pending destruction of the Republican party and the conservative movement. It has been nearly 15 years since John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira heralded “The Emerging Democratic Majority” in their celebrated book by that title. Articles titled “The End of the Republican Party” or similar are found almost daily not only in moonbat online journals such as Salon but in the New York Times.