It seems an unbelievable question to ask, and certainly way premature. The last time one of the major parties died was in the mid-nineteenth century. But the Republican Party is in crisis, and it is worth looking at history to examine the likelihood that there could be another party death.
The first thing to consider is that the Republican Party has rebounded several times after taking big hits. It rebounded after the 20-year FDR/Truman period, which was longer than the Democratic Party has ever been out of the White House. It rebounded after Watergate. It rebounded after the Clinton years.
Also, the Republican Party has changed considerably since its birth, in both philosophy and demographics. Indeed, the Republicans and Democrats practically switched places over the last century-and-a-half. In Lincoln's day, the Republicans advocated greater taxation and an activist federal government, while the Democrats preached laissez faire and states' rights. That's not to mention the racial angle: the party of Lincoln became the party of neo-Confederates, while the Democrats evolved from a white-supremacist party into a civil rights party, one that ended up giving us our first black president.
Lewis Gould's 2003 book Grand Old Party helped me better understand this bizarre evolution. The story is gradual, taking us from William Jennings Bryan to Teddy Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt and on to LBJ. I have written in more detail about the process here.
On the other hand, some features of the parties have remained constant. The Republicans were always thought of as the party of business, and the Democrats as the party of the people.
The question is how easily a party can survive as an institution while undergoing great internal modifications. The changes I have mentioned happened over the course of many decades.
There has long been demand for a secular, fiscally conservative party. That's what Ross Perot's candidacy was about. Remember, he was actually in the lead early in the 1992 race. What if he had retained that lead into November? My guess is that he would have won enough electoral votes to throw the race into Congress, which would then almost certainly have picked one of the major-party contenders (Bush or Clinton). In other words, our current electoral system greatly prevents any third party from ever gaining a foothold.
But then, if a situation like that were to occur, the public might get mad enough to demand electoral reform.
It seems more likely that the Republicans will simply choose to move in a more secular direction. The Obama presidency is probably ripe for that kind of change--whether he succeeds or fails.
The problem is that the Republican leadership has shown no signs of wanting to move in that direction. They also seem boxed in when it comes to racial issues. The election of Michael Steele to RNC chair is a case in point. What has rarely been mentioned is that the RNC's second choice was Katon Dawson, the one who belonged to the whites-only country club.
What would have happened if they had picked him and not Steele? I would think it would have sealed their fate as the party of fundamentalists and white racists. I really cannot see how they could survive that travesty. Not in the age of Obama. The fact that they came so close suggests how clueless they really are.
It's no wonder I keep hearing bloggers speculate about the death of the Republican Party. The reason usually given is the Republican base's delusional belief that Palin and Limbaugh represent their greatest hopes.
Seeing Obama as the new Carter and Palin as the new Reagan is indeed delusional, not only because it underestimates Obama's talents and overestimates Palin's, but even more because Reagan's candidacy represented the end result of more than a decade of conservative thought coalescing into a winning electoral strategy.
By now, the conservative movement that Reagan helped create is flying apart at the seams. That's why they had so much trouble finding an ideal candidate in 2008. The talk-radio hosts wanted Romney or Thompson; evangelicals tended to gravitate toward Huckabee; foreign-policy hawks and law-and-order types liked Giuliani; moderate Republicans and neocons were divided between Giuliani and McCain; and the increasingly alienated libertarians preferred Ron Paul. No one candidate was able to hold the Republican coalition together.
It's not just the secular versus the religious, it's also the hawks versus the isolationists. The Republican Party has always included all those strains, but for decades it knew how to pass itself off as a unified movement. That era is gone, done in by the Bush Administration's overreach in both religion and foreign affairs. The party may survive, just as the Democrats survived the collapse of the New Deal coalition. Then again, the Republicans have always prided themselves in presenting a unified front, whereas the Democrats made peace with their own contradictions a long time ago. The Republicans never had their Will Rogers who could quip, "I belong to no organized party, I'm a Republican."
The idea that either of the two parties could truly disappear seems a long shot to me. Nevertheless, the Republican Party is in serious trouble right now, and I feel in my bones that it'll be a while before they successfully emerge from the muck.