Gene Lyons and Joe Conason provided a more succinct read in The Hunting of the President. It goes a little something like this:

Goldwater's loss to LBJ revealed that fiscal conservatives had no electability so Lee Atwater took over republican electoral strategy and went visceral. To be fair, the Democrats beat them there:

So the party of lower taxes became the party of God, and then the party of God became the party of conservative social values, and then the party of conservative social values became the party of fuck everything progressive.

The problem is the longer you run away from the children, the smaller your base becomes.

Gay marriage is now legal in Ireland. I was voting back when Sinead O'Connor became literally the worst person in the world for implying that the Pope wasn't a nice guy. Marijuana is legal or de-facto legal in half a dozen states and a giant government stimulus program saved the economy again, which pretty much put to rest all those fuckers that insisted the New Deal was a bad idea. Meanwhile we kind of sort of have healthcare, there's a black President and our primary international concern is "oh shit terrorists in the Middle East might try and shoot some people or something" instead of "holy fuck we're half an hour from armageddon AT ALL TIMES."

You can only get so spun up. Bruce Jenner is gone and Caitlin Jenner is on the cover of Vogue and all the Republican strategists cut their teeth back when it was rumored Arthur Ashe died of AIDS which confused the hell out of everyone because he wasn't gay. Yet that's what they lead with.

An old boss of mine made the observation that the Democratic party of the 2000s was a little to the right of the Republican party of the '60s. Know who created the EPA? Same bleeding heart mutherfucker that thawed relations with China, that old Lefty Nixon.

The Right doesn't win because as both parties move right the outlier gets less share. Plain and simple. If the conservatives had any goddamn sense they'd pile money into Bernie Sanders and Ralph Nader.

It worked in 2000.