Here is the immediate future for the Republican Party

What will defeat do to the Republicans?

You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.

Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.

Why will the G.O.P. become more, not less, extreme? For one thing, projections suggest that this election will drive many of the remaining Republican moderates out of Congress, while leaving the hard right in place.

That's what Paul Krugman thinks, and the eight-year-long temper trantrum ending by the ridiculous impeachment of Clinton thrown by Congressional Republicans when Clinton won the Presidency in 1992 makes it appear very likely. He continues:

Republicans will still be in a position to block some Democratic initiatives, especially if the Democrats fail to achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

And that blocking ability will ensure that the G.O.P. continues to receive plenty of corporate dollars: this year the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has poured money into the campaigns of Senate Republicans like Minnesota’s Norm Coleman, precisely in the hope of denying Democrats a majority large enough to pass pro-labor legislation.

But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

Steve Benen points out that

...the [Republican] party's base has already staked its claim -- conservatives firmly believe that Republicans lost in 2006 and have struggled in 2008 because the party just isn't reactionary enough. Indeed, the party's activists are out for blood: "Jim Nuzzo, a White House aide to the first President Bush, dismissed Mrs Palin's critics as 'cocktail party conservatives' who 'give aid and comfort to the enemy'. He told The Sunday Telegraph: 'There's going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party.'"

America is entering the worst economic period since the Depression, and it is going to be saddled with a super reactionary angry right wing party who refuses to admit they caused much of the economic crisis. They will also attempt to block any effective efforts to resolve the economic problems they have left after Bush/Cheney leaves office.

It's tough enough to fix a bad mess when things break down anyway,but it's a lot harder when someone slaps you every time you try to pick up a tool to fix the mess and tells you "It'll fix itself!" That's the future of the Republican Party, though. Slapping anyone who tries to fix the disaster they left behind them.