In 2008, Republicans suffered a landslide defeat after placing Sarah Palin on the ballot and setting her loose on the campaign trail, with the overwhelming approval of the conservative commentariat, to whip up an ugly right-wing populism. Upon losing, Republicans engaged in almost no reflection before launching a campaign of massive resistance to Barack Obama’s presidency.

In 2012, Republicans selected Mitt Romney, an anti-immigrant, centimillionaire businessman as their presidential nominee, and he in turn selected the most influential movement conservative in the country, Paul Ryan, to be his running mate. The two candidates effectively turned Ryan’s contentious policy agenda into a governing platform, and campaigned as tribunes against a culture that promoted “takers” (i.e. poor minorities) at the expense of “makers” (i.e. white businessmen). Despite losing that election too, the massive resistance campaign continued.

Amid and after both elections, liberals complained to and warned conservatives—as they have for decades—that Republican politicians were pandering to racists for votes. Conservatives, as is their custom, reacted poorly to this critique, dismissing it as race-card-playing cynicism designed to stifle substantive debate. To the extent that they internalized it at all, it was thanks to 2012 election data, which showed Republicans hemorrhaging support among Hispanic and other minority voters. The GOP responded to this data not by reinventing itself, but by trying to hustle an immigration reform bill through Congress before the very voters they’d been pandering to got a hold of the legislation and killed it. That effort also failed.

Conservatives remain loath to acknowledge the obvious, but the liberal critique of their politics is correct, and it took the Donald Trump juggernaut to wake them up to it. Indeed, the fact that liberals had a more accurate read on conservative politics than most professional conservatives seems to bother many conservatives more than the substance of the critique itself.

“It would be terrible to think that the left was right about the right all these years,” Bret Stephens wrote on Monday at the Wall Street Journal. “Nativist bigotries must not be allowed to become the animating spirit of the Republican Party. If Donald Trump becomes the candidate, he will not win the presidency, but he will help vindicate the left’s ugly indictment.”