They sound like the Bourbons -- "never learned anything, and never forgot anything". Sounds like a good subject for a deepthinking, multivolume psychopathology study.
Here’s what I think the vicious cycle is that the GOP keeps falling into.
Some Republican candidates appear on the scene who explicitly call out how truly devastating and dangerous the policies of the Democrats are for this country. Naturally, they are beloved by the base who are the one group of Americans who has done their homework and understands the destructive nature of the Left.
The Democrats see these politicians as especially threatening because not only do they know what the Democrats are up to but they’re not afraid to speak the truth. Therefore the liberal media unleashes a massive smear campaign against them involving all the Alinsky-ite tactics of ridicule, lies and such and such.
The liberal media’s attacks begin to have the desired effect and drive down their poll numbers. The GOP elites then get scared and seek to marginalize those candidates because they’re afraid they’ll make the whole party unpopular, hurt fundraising, etc.
It happened to Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Allen West and Donald Trump. All of them are now too hot for GOP TV.
What we need is a party that will back up and defend candidates who speak the truth like these ones do. For whatever reason, the GOP doesn’t think it’s in their best interest to truly define the Left for how destructive it really is in the eyes of the American public. But if we don’t succeed at doing that, we’ll continue to lose elections at least half the time. It’s just unbelievably frustrating to see the GOP cave in on our conservative warriors right at the moment when the Leftists are demonstrating that they’re feeling threatened and vulnerable from the force of the attacks.