The Republican Party as a Party has become a hotbed of elected officials who betray a stunning indifference to the quality of the public policy they pursue, seeing all issues in purely partisan, vaguely ideological terms — “vaguely ideological” because they claim to be “conservative,” but theirs is a grossly degraded version of conservatism, one that has entirely jettisoned the important conservative idea of acting on principle, without regard to practical consequences — always a fatal idea to any working politician, but also the important principles of comity, respectability, and the critical principle of noblesse oblige, the absence of which best explains their manifest willingness to inflict on their often poorer, less well educated constituents, especially the black ones, policies that actively harm those constituents. The past does not dictate the future minutely, but it forecloses some options and makes others more likely.