This got too long for a comment on Laskas’s New Conspiracy Theory:

Something like what Laska’s talking about there must be happening. Not so much a conscious conspiracy but a conspiracy of themes/interests. Once the Tea Party came in, inevitable consequences of the “Reagan Revolution” were fulfilled, the party started falling apart — not losing elections but losing the organization and discipline to support its electoral successes. Nothing lasts forever. Conservatism may be long past ready to give up on abortion, gay marriage — for people like the Bushes and McCain, that was never real — thus casting off the evangelicals as worn-out tools. As Laska suggests, why wouldn’t establishment conservatives look at coalition with Hillary?

The irony for the left, this season imagining taking over the Democratic Party for socialism and peace, would be that in the absence of a (disciplined) right-wing party to oppose it, the Dem. Party doesn’t get more left, but the opposite, becoming instead the only party with real organization, technocracy, and appeal for elite (i.e., real) conservatism; naturally Dems move to pick up those people and that funding. In this reading, the Dem impulse — just as, I suspect, with DLC/New Democrat “reforms”  — is always ultimately partisan (save and strengthen the party), with ideology following on that imperative.

As certain lefty liberals have long believed that if only the GOP could be destroyed, the Dems, no longer then under rightward pressure, would be free to flower as a lefty party,  evangelicals have dreamed of a Great Awakening via a GOP dancing on the ashes of liberalism. Neither is going to happen. While we’re doing counterfactuals, the really interesting future opposition coalition — opposing what, in this fantasy, will soon become a hyperdominant, center-right Democratic Party, and opposing even party itself, as we’ve come to know it in the USA — will bring the socialist left together with evangelicalism. As it was in the beginning, 1750’s-1790’s.