So they have focused their attention on a technical hiccup and tried to spin it as a symptom of systematic incompetency — if the Obama administration can’t run a complicated Web site, it is incapable of managing a complicated policy. But this logic simply pushes beyond credibility. As the president said Monday: “Let me remind everybody that the Affordable Care Act is not just a Web site.” The Web site is only a part of the whole.

But to many Republicans who are stuck fighting a battle that’s already been lost rather than moving on to the next challenge, this Web site problem offers a sliver of hope that they can turn people off from the law. So far, it isn’t working. According to a Gallup poll released Wednesday, there has been an uptick in support for the law since the Web site opened.

Sometimes you simply have to accept reality, and sometimes that reality is accepting defeat. Learn from it. Grow from it. But first you must admit it. That’s the modern Republican Party’s problem — blindness to the obvious.

The Republican Party’s conduct during this period in the country’s history will get the same sober, thorough judgment from history as the health care law, and that judgment is not likely to be kind.

History will record that this is the moment that the party camped out in its own graveyard, hastening the demise of its national viability; that it gave up on America, while constantly reminiscing about America as it once was; that its thought leaders were replaced by crusade leaders and the Grand Old Party saw its grandeur subside; that it came to realize that it couldn’t forever be the party of intransigence in a nation of progress, without being burned by the friction inherent in those two warring concepts.

This is the moment when the rest of America realized that opposition isn’t an idea, and preventing things from getting done is not the same as getting things done.