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<div class="">December 8, 2012</div>
<h1>A Lost Civilization</h1>
<h6 class="">By
<span>
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/maureendowd/index.html" rel="author" title="More Articles by MAUREEN DOWD"><span>MAUREEN DOWD</span></a></span></h6>
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<p>
WASHINGTON </p>
<p>
MY college roommates and I used to grocery shop and cook together. The
only food we seemed to agree on was corn, so we ate a lot of corn.
</p>
<p>
My mom would periodically call to warn me in a dire tone, “Do you know why the Incas are extinct?” </p>
<p>
Her maize hazing left me with a deeply ingrained fear of being part of a
civilization that was obliviously engaging in behavior that would lead
to its extinction. </p>
<p>
Too bad the Republican Party didn’t have my mom to keep it on its toes.
Then it might not have gone all Apocalypto on us — becoming the first
civilization in modern history to spiral the way of the Incas, Aztecs
and Mayans. </p>
<p>
The Mayans were right, as it turns out, when they predicted the world
would end in 2012. It was just a select world: the G.O.P. universe of
arrogant, uptight, entitled, bossy, retrogressive white guys. </p>
<p>
Just another vanishing tribe that fought the cultural and demographic tides of history. </p>
<p>
Someday, it will be the subject of a National Geographic special, or a
Mel Gibson movie, where archaeologists piece together who the lost tribe
was, where it came from, and what happened to it. The experts will sift
through the ruins of the Reagan Presidential Library, Dick Cheney’s
shotgun casings, Orca poll monitoring hieroglyphics, remnants of
triumphal rants by Dick Morris on Fox News, faded photos of Clint
Eastwood and an empty chair, and scraps of ancient tape in which a tall,
stiff man, his name long forgotten, gnashes his teeth about the 47
percent of moochers and the “gifts” they got. </p>
<p>
Instead of smallpox, plagues, drought and Conquistadors, the Republican
decline will be traced to a stubborn refusal to adapt to a world where
poor people and sick people and black people and brown people and female
people and gay people count. </p>
<p>
As the historian Will Durant observed, “A great civilization is not
conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
</p>
<p>
President Obama’s victory margin is expanding, as more votes are
counted. He didn’t just beat Romney; he’s still beating him. But another
sign of the old guard’s denial came on Friday, a month after the
election, when the Romney campaign ebulliently announced that it raised
$85.9 million in the final weeks of the campaign, making its
fund-raising effort “the most successful in Republican Party history.”
</p>
<p>
Why is the Romney campaign still boasting? You can’t celebrate at a
funeral. Go away and learn how to crunch data on the Internet. </p>
<p>
Outside the Republican walled kingdom of denial and delusion, everyone
else could see that the once clever and ruthless party was behaving in
an obtuse and outmoded way that spelled doom. </p>
<p>
The G.O.P. put up a candidate that no one liked or understood and ran a
campaign that no one liked or understood — a campaign animated by the
idea that indolent, grasping serfs must be kept down, even if it meant
creating barriers to letting them vote. </p>
<p>
Although Stuart Stevens, the Romney strategist, now claims that Mitt
“captured the imagination of millions” and ran “with a natural grace,”
there was very little chance that the awkward gazillionaire was ever
going to be president. Yet strangely, Republicans are still gobsmacked
by their loss, grasping at straws like Sandy as an excuse. </p>
<p>
Some G.O.P. House members continue to try to wrestle the president over
the fiscal cliff. Romney wanders in a daze, his hair not perfectly
gelled. And his campaign advisers continue to express astonishment that a
disastrous campaign, convention and candidate, as well as a lack of
familiarity with what Stevens dismissively calls “whiz-bang turnout
technologies,” could possibly lead to defeat. </p>
<p>
Who would ever have thought blacks would get out and support the first
black president? Who would ever have thought women would shy away from
the party of transvaginal probes? Who would ever have thought gays would
work against a party that treated them as immoral and subhuman? Who
would have ever thought young people would desert a party that ignored
science and hectored on social issues? Who would ever have thought
Latinos would scorn a party that expected them to finish up their chores
and self-deport? </p>
<p>
Republicans know they’re in trouble when W. emerges as the moral voice
of the party. The former president lectured the G.O.P. on Tuesday about
being more “benevolent” toward immigrants. </p>
<p>
As Eva Longoria supersedes Karl Rove as a power player, Republicans act
as shellshocked as the Southern gentry overrun by Yankee carpetbaggers
in “Gone with the Wind.” As the movie eulogized: “Here was the last ever
to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave.
Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a
Civilization gone with the wind.” </p>
<p>
Gun sales have burgeoned since the president’s re-election, with Black
Friday weapons purchases setting records as the dead-enders rush to arm
themselves. </p>
<p>
But history will no doubt record that withering Republicans were finally
wiped from the earth in 2016 when the relentless (and rested)
Conquistadora Hillary marched in, General Bill on a horse behind her,
and finished them off. </p>
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