We are heading into the end phase of the most recent Great Progressive Awakening. This awakening started in the early 1990’s and was in full bloom in the 2000’s. The peak would be 2008 and it has been losing air ever since. Barak Obama in the White House probably kept it going longer than it should, but history is full of accidents. As Obama heads for the final turn, the movement that buoyed him is reaching its denouement.

For those unfamiliar with my oeuvre, I have a lot of new readers of late, the term Great Progressive Awakening is a play on The Great Awakening. The New Religion of America we call Progressivism or Liberalism has inherited the spiritual rhythms of main line Protestantism. Periods of activity where the faith is ascendent are followed by periods where it is dormant and going through a reordering.

The transition from main line Protestantism began in the 19th century with the Civil War. Read contemporaneous works by abolitionists and it is impossible to miss the spiritual fervor of the people in the movement. By killing the Southerners and breaking up slavery, God’s chosen were doing his work on earth.

Another awakening began at the end of the 19th century, eventually giving us Wilson, genuine socialism, internationalism, eugenics and Prohibition. These waves of religiosity are just as prone to world events as any other movement. Hitler and the war pumped a lot of air into the New Deal and largely collapsed the old traditional American conservatism that should have been a break on socialism.

The result has been an increasingly Progressive country as the Cult transformed from an economic movement with cultural overtones to a purely cultural phenomenon with some residual economic policies from the old days. Elizabeth Warren ranting about TPP is just a way to light some candles to the ancestors of the One True Faith. Warren got rich working for a giant hedge fund that runs an elite training facility. She likes corporatism as much as everyone else.

Warren’s rise is properly viewed as a lagging indicator of the current Progressive wave. The backlash started in 2010 and has continued every since, which has been evident in the three elections since this wave peaked in 2008. The ascendance of a weak and not altogether coherent poser like Warren says the movement is struggling with dis-conformation. The anointing of Obama, it turns out, did not bring about the rapture.

There are other signs that this wave is flagging. The most obvious being the whistling past the graveyard stuff like this article from Politco, the moonbat site for Blue Team fanatics.

It turns out that one of the Grand Old Party’s biggest—and least discussed—challenges going into 2016 is lying in plain sight, written right into the party’s own nickname. The Republican Party voter is old—and getting older, and as the adage goes, there are two certainties in life: Death and taxes. Right now, both are enemies of the GOP and they might want to worry more about the former than the latter.

There’s been much written about how millennials are becoming a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, but there’s been much less attention paid to one of the biggest get-out-the-vote challenges for the Republican Party heading into the next presidential election: Hundreds of thousands of their traditional core supporters won’t be able to turn out to vote at all.

The party’s core is dying off by the day.

Death cults like American Liberalism are fond of these sorts of fantasies. Faced with disconfirming reality, they have two choices. One is to accept that there is no heaven on earth and there’s no way to arrange things to attain it. That means abandoning the one true faith. The other option is to blame enemies of the revolution, spies and saboteurs. Shockingly, every Rousseau-ist cult goes for door number two.

To the great consternation of Progressives everywhere, murdering the enemies of the revolution is not an option in America. Instead they have to sate this urge with revenge fantasies involving the natural death of those they believe are holding them back. Five years ago, they claimed the people voting against Obama’s party were old farts ready for the grave. Now, those same old farts are in the way, but time is on the side of the anointed!

Reality, that thing that confounds mass movements everywhere, is something different. Young people are always the ones most likely to fall for nonsense like communism, Fabian socialism, Nazism, and now The New Religion. As we get older, we get wiser and are less inclined to be swept up in goofy fads like anti-racism or feminism. While the GOP is not of much use as a political party, it does provide a home of those who have outgrown the childish ideas of Cultural Marxism, socialism and the like.

Those old farts in the GOP may be headed for the grave, but there are more old farts where they came from.