"The Irrepressible Conflict between the Jeb Bush Republicans and the Paul Ryan Republicans"

"Which way will this civil war go?

"Undoubtedly it will be bitter. The true believers will fulminate that they were tricked by the establishment into accepting Romney, John McCain, and free-spending, big-government fellow traveler George W. Bush. The Tea Partiers are a minority in America but almost certainly a majority in what could become a smaller and smaller Republican Party. And the GOP’s experience in California suggests that one beating, or even several, may not yield a GOP self-correction but a dug-in revanchism. The state party’s response has been to lurch rightward. The result, as McCain’s chief 2008 strategist Steve Schmidt predicts, is that Republicans could soon become 'the third party' in the nation’s largest state—behind Democrats and independents.

"In an America where the party of angry white men increasingly speaks for and to a permanent minority, it could take another defeat and maybe another before the GOP comes to its senses. Surely Romney himself would have been better off in the general election if he had defended his Massachusetts health-care reform and sounded occasional notes of pragmatism and compassion. But then, of course, he never would have been the nominee."

Robert Shrum at The Daily Beast contemplates a post-Romney Republican Party.