Mitch McConnell Doubling Down on the Republican Base: Why the GOP is racing for an utter train wreck

Apparently Mitch McConnell told CNN this morning that this Senate will not even consider approving Merrick Garland for a seat on the Supreme Court in its lame duck session after the general election.  Moreover, he stated unequivocally that he would support the GOP Presidential nominee whoever that nominee turned out to be, implying that he would be OK weathering the fortunes of a Trump nomination against Hillary Clinton.  To the extent that he and Paul Ryan stand as the GOP's two most obvious federal stand bearers in an election year when the Republican Party base has seemed determined in state level primary and caucus fights to buck national leadership, it is worth considering why someone of Mitch McConnell's stature would be so dogmatically determined to set the national GOP on a course for certain self-demolition!  Either McConnell senses that he and his party may discover an opportunity to veer off from a catastrophe and save face before the general election or, in view of his ostentatiously bellicose and aristocratic ethos and doctrinaire faith in the conservative mindset of a rapidly dissolving White, Anglo national electoral majority, he somehow cannot comprehend that his party stands preciously little chance of winning in November.  The third possibility, obviously commanding significant attention among incumbent Republicans in Washington, is that the persistent nurturing of a radically participatory rightist base, most recently with the development of the Tea Parties, has institutionally driven federal Republican leadership to a position where they recognize that it will be impossible to secure the reelection of incumbent Congressional office holders if they do not curry favor to the most intransigent views of the radical right, opposing any measure of compromise and bipartisanship with Congressional Democrats and Obama administration.  Succinctly, to the extent that this certainly seems to be the gist of McConnell's strategizing, it seems certain to be a losing strategy for the GOP - their base cannot deliver the Presidency in the general election and they may not even be able to secure contested Senate seats in Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, and New Hampshire.  As many other political analysts have astutely noted, the GOP is becoming its own self-contained, myopic political universe, where American ethnicity/race, politics, and culture remain suspended in the 1950s and where the effects of unrestrained government retraction on economic policy, manifest as an unremitting deepening of inequality in opportunity and income, are occluded by an absolutely faith that governmental intervention is the single greatest source hindering American economic growth.  In the latter respect, Trump's opposition to free trade, however simplistically articulated, may constitute the first step of a Republican Party Presidential candidate to challenge neoliberal economic orthodoxy on the politics of the global economy.  Indisputably, McConnell is signing himself onto a partisan slate that cannot win, even among its most adamant Wall Street supporters.  A Republican Party that succeeds in assuming its destiny of becoming the party of an older, rural, White, isolationist America is ultimately consigning itself the fate of becoming virtually irrelevant in determining the course of the country as we continue to venture against the challenges of the early Twenty-first century.  In the absence of any true alternative to Clinton's version of the Democratic Party, we need to ask what direction politics will take across the American political mainstream as we become more global, more ethnically diverse, more economically liberal/neoliberal, less religious, and, generally, less demographically and politically homogeneous.  I feel certain that there is no future for the GOP in its current form in this burgeoning America, but I await a better alternative than Clinton and her party!