I WAS WRONG ABOUT THE REFORMISH CONSERVATIVES.

• Author: Cooper, Ryan

After Barack Obama's decisive reelection victory in 2012, it looked as though the long process of conservative radicalization might be at a turning point. Democrats had trounced Republicans among all minority groups. The Republican National Committee, aware that the white GOP base constituted a shrinking share of the electorate, released a stunning "autopsy" report, diagnosing what had gone wrong. The document warned that the party was becoming closed-minded, that it needed to move left on LGBTQ issues, and that its stance on immigration would have to change.

By 2013 there appeared to be a burgeoning conservative reform movement--and I decided to write about it. I interviewed many of the reformers, including former Reagan administration official Bruce Bartlett and then conservative commentators Josh Barro and Ramesh Ponnuru. At the time, they were pushing for moderate immigration reform and for tentative moves away from the traditional right-wing insistence on tax and welfare cuts. Their efforts were fairly weak, I argued, and they faced "an extremely steep climb" to achieve influence. But, I concluded, "if in 2016 a Republican presidential contender can break free from the death grip of conservative Know-Nothingism and still succeed electorally," the reformers "may well become very influential."

Whoops.

Instead, the Republican Party drank even more deeply from the well of Know-Nothingism in 2016, nominating a racist game show host with literally zero political experience--and he won. Despite my caveats, the whole premise of the article was disastrously wrong. Now it's time for an autopsy report of my own.

There were four factors that made a hash of my thinking. First, I failed to anticipate Republicans winning a blowout victory in the 2014 midterms. This seriously dented what little momentum reformers had.

Second, I didn't realize what a disaster nominating Hillary Clinton in 2016 would be for the Democrats. She had an astoundingly difficult time putting away Bernie Sanders, who at the time was a barely known weirdo from the second-smallest state in the nation. By late 2015--long before the email story got going--her popularity numbers were deep underwater, where they would remain. She ended up being the second-most-unpopular major-party nominee in the history of polling, behind only Donald Trump himself.

Third, I failed to anticipate the depths of moral depravity to which the Republican Party would sink. I implicitly assumed that if...