“These are the times that try men’s souls” wrote Thomas Paine during the darkest days of the American Revolution.
Today, the GOP is facing its own crisis. It has reached an intellectual and spiritual nadir. And this is a crisis that tries not only men’s souls, but also their political allegiance.
Simply put, at a moment of national crisis, from deep within its dark bowls the Republican Party has vomited up one of the most appalling and inadequate collections of presidential candidates ever seen in American history.
A few decades ago, Tip O’Neill called the GOP “the party of ideas.”
Today, that well appears to have gone dry. Instead of new solutions, or fresh perspectives, we get regurgitated slogans from the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, indefensible policy positions, rigid ideological dogma- and anger, lots of anger. The GOP has become more intellectually impoverished even as it has grown increasingly shrill.  
As a result, in today’s GOP, government is always bad, and the “free market” is always good.
People are unemployed because they are lazy. Wall Street bears no responsibility for the housing bubble, the financial crash, or the recession- that was all Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s fault.
Access to adequate and affordable health care isn’t a fundamental right, but access to an unhealthy dessert is.
The way to fix the federal budget deficit is to take services and benefits away from poor people and the middle class. Taxes can never go up. And all of this has somehow been ordained by God and the Founding Fathers. 
The great American conservative thinker Russell Kirk once wrote that some catastrophes “compel society to re-examine first principles.” America is still reeling from such a catastrophe.
Yet this has produced no self-reflection within the GOP, nor any honest re-examination of principles or policy. Instead, we’ve witnessed the emergence of the political equivalent of the “rage virus” a dangerous and virulent pathogen against which conservatism seems to have no natural defense that thrives in the fetid stew of fear, ignorance, and anger that characterizes today’s GOP.   
The GOP has weathered previous crises. Today, the work of conservative intellectuals like David Frum, and leaders like Jon Huntsman, is keeping the light on in the Republican Party- and sustaining hope that the conservative movement might rediscover its rich intellectual heritage and reform. Until then, however, the GOP and its conservative base have the presidential candidates that they deserve.
(Michael Stafford is a former Republican Party officer and can be reached at anupwardcalling@yahoo.com.)