At some point the GOP will have to engage in some soul-searching about its post-Trump future. To my mind, this piece contains more wishful thinking and head-in-sand naivete than actual insight. Not a promising start to the process of GOP reinvention. thebulwark.com/the-post-trump…
The most glaring omission here is demographics. The GOP's approach to culture war issues has alienated it from young voters, non-white voters, and college educated women. That's, um, a pretty huge electoral problem that this piece does not even mention.
For crying out loud, even Mick Mulvaney saw the huge challenges the GOP faced in 2014 in terms of how its brand had become so associated with white identity politics. It's only gotten way worse since then.
According to exit polls, this is what the coalitions that voted for Trump and Clinton looked like.
Trump voters were 90% white, 10% non-white.
Clinton voters were 55% white, 45% non-white.
American demographics are trending AWAY from the GOP and toward the Democrats.
Trump voters were 90% white, 10% non-white.
Clinton voters were 55% white, 45% non-white.
American demographics are trending AWAY from the GOP and toward the Democrats.
Any piece on the post-Trump future of the GOP has to do one of two things. It has to either be frank about how the party can suppress the votes of young people and people of color, or it has to have a plan for how it can win the votes of those demographics.
This piece invokes the spirit of Goldwater in a good way, yet fails to mention that 1964 was the year the GOP drove black voters out of their party with a vengeance. They haven't gotten more than 15% of the black vote since 1960.
To pretend like the unbearable and unsustainable whiteness of the GOP in an ever more diverse US is not a problem with which the party should engage is just...sadly, predictable. 
To be blunt, Trump (with the help of Stephen Miller) has associated the GOP brand with implicit (if not explicit) white nationalism. Any post-Trump GOP is going to have to either directly disavow that, or just openly embrace it. It can't just be ignored in favor of GWB-lite.
And that engagement has to involve more than just "we're not racists, it's not our fault that black voters won't leave the Democrat plantation!"
