The Republican Party platform of 2012 was written by right wing religious fanatics who think we can simply pretend the past did not happen, and re-write it to be more amenable to conservative denialists, those same people who hijacked the Republican Party starting in 1964 and who now do not want to be forced to wake up.

How can anyone talk about what the GOP needs to do to fix itself without mentioning the religious fantatics? Without mentioning denialism? Revisionism?

Ralph Reed thought the GOP just needed more likeable candidates, as though the platform was just fine. Marry this to the idea that Democrats only voted for Obama because George Clooney did, and you get an idea of where the Republican Party is headed.

And where it is headed is not toward a solution.

Yes, as Ross Douthat  says, “Both shifts, demographic and economic, must be addressed if Republicans are to find a way back to the majority.” But the problem is not, as he claims, the possibility that “the party’s elites will…fasten on the demographic explanation,” but that they will, like Douthat himself, ignore the cultural and social explanations.

Amnesty for illegal aliens will not fix the Republican Party. Douthat points out that, “The Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer argued that if the Republican Party embraced amnesty and nominated Marco Rubio, it would win the Hispanic vote outright in 2016, solving its demographic problem in one swoop. Judging from the noises emanating from John Boehner and Eric Cantor, the party’s Congressional leadership agrees.”

But that’s not true, and Douthat knows it, saying that “the idea of amnesty as a Latino-winning electoral silver bullet is a fantasy.”

It is a fantasy. As is any solution to the GOP’s problems that does not include a re-evaluation of culture war issues: abortion, contraception, and marriage equality. Or a re-evaluation of the position that the federal government is the enemy. Or a re-evaluation of the position that global warming is a liberal plot.