THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

John Batchelor, a lifelong Republican conservative, rails against the evil done to the party he has supported all his life.

I am the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Hoosier Republicans who marched through Georgia with Sherman, endured jobs on the Pennsy, and then survived the Hitlerites from Omaha Beach to Berlin. My father is at Arlington now and would not at first be comfortable with my saying what he himself could see in his last years as he watched the Keystone State become solid blue. The Democrats win just because the Republicans have disqualified themselves as leaders with their greed, cruelty, and surprising clumsiness. From Herbert Hoover to Robert Taft, from the Bush clan to the ridiculous Tom DeLay, not one note of grace, not a convincing moment of understanding that the Republican Party is about honest liberty for honest, laboring people—not about Wall Street, the tax code, chasing Reds, or bullying the lonely.

Vigilant Democrats worry today that the Republican Party is only playing possum, or that it can be revived by extraordinary means such as a Martian invasion. In fact, the GOP is a mummy-wrapped skeleton sitting in its own chilly mausoleum of bilious resentments and creepy sentimentality. What remains to call themselves Republicans are baldly badly educated or just prankish Confederate re-enactors—chubby men in gray and butternut suits with gold buttons and feather-tipped hats, clanking down stairs with shiny sabers. A handful of them are just boors from the South who look poorly on horseback and wave unread Bibles while calling for Billy Sunday to rise like the gold market.

And as with the aforementioned Billy Sunday, John sees no hope of a resurrerection for the party of No. And looking at what it has become, few of us will mourn.