We are living in a moment of high paradox in political history. Over the past decade, the Republican Party — which was born in the 1850s as an upstart, anti-slavery alternative to the conservative Democratic Party, and whose first successful presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, freed the South’s slaves — has become the last bastion of the Confederacy’s ideal of a Christian, white supremacist oligarchy.

The good news for the country is that the voter rolls of the neo-Confederate GOP are shrinking at the same time its median age is skewing much older, according to recent demographic studies based on polls and voting data:

• More Southern: Results from the election last November show that the GOP’s power base has retracted into the Deep South: “On Nov. 4 Obama won 55 of the 152 electoral votes of the 11 states of the old Confederacy. While he was winning in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, John McCain was outperforming George Bush throughout the region as a whole. The Republican vote in the South in 2008 actually increased over 2004.”
• Shrinking: A Washington Post/ABC poll released last week found that only 21 percent of Americans — that’s about one in five — will admit that they are Republicans.
• Less diverse and older: Demographic research reported last summer found that only 2 percent of Latinos and just 1 percent of African Americans claim membership in the GOP. The same report found that the party is also getting older — only 15 percent of GOP registrants are under 35 years old.

Of course, the GOP has faced annihilation before — notably in the 1930s after its economic policies led to the Great Depression, in the 1950s when Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy led his party down the anti-communist rabbit hole and in the 1970s after the party forced its own president, Richard Nixon, out of office by threatening to impeach him during the Watergate scandal.

After the debacles of the 1930s and 1950s, the GOP righted itself by waiting out the American public’s notoriously short memories for political skullduggery — and by nominating liberal Republican governors and moderate presidents before regaining control of Congress decades later, in the 1950s and the 1990s, respectively.

During his presidency, Nixon signed a new lease on life for his party with his “Southern Strategy” of inviting Democrats from the former Confederate states who were disaffected by LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act and by antiwar protests in the Vietnam era into the GOP.

After Watergate, the party was rescued by Ronald Reagan, who tempered his Hollywood secularism by amorally climbing into bed with Jerry Falwell and his Christian nationalist “Moral Majority.”

There will always be a conservative movement in the United States, of course, but the question now is not just how the Grand Old Party will return from exile — hint: it won’t come as a result of “listening tours” where GOP pols talk much, say little and listen not at all — but also whether the party’s brand can survive its complicity in the Bush administration’s torture regime, disastrous economic and foreign policies and other failures.

The Faustian deals struck by two Republican presidents from Southern California, Nixon and Reagan, with the Christian nationalist sons and daughters of the Confederate oligarchs, helped the GOP survive on life support. But if current trends continue, we may see that the party has been lingering in Stage 5 of a disease for which there is no Stage 6.

Unlike the earlier exaggerations of the GOP’s demise, the party’s fate appears to be truly dire now because the country is facing a radical restructuring of its racial diversity. Studies suggest that by 2050, half the country will be people of color.

It’s hard to see how the GOP can survive in that new era without rolling up its welcome mat for the tattered remnants of the Confederacy, once and for all.