The most notable thing about the news of Sarah Palin sliding off the skillet at Fox News, her contributor’s contract expiring after a long dribble on life support, is how un-newsy it was—barely a pebble splash. Palin’s being let go from Fox News seemed as negligible as the CW canceling a series that viewers had forgotten was still on. There was a time not that long ago in our post 9/11 delirium when every sassy, spangly number Palin performed under the political big top kicked up sawdust and attracted yokel attention in the political media. Her appearances on Fox News were billed in advance as if she were about to lay down another smacking on the liberals and squishy conservatives who were still a-sceered of her grizzly-mama scorn, no matter how much they pretended otherwise behind their cocktail-party smirks. Palin had those millions of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, after all, a mighty army of admirers who could be mobilized at a moment’s notice to rise up in revolt and fire off a tweet or two before collapsing back on the sofa, not wanting to miss too much television.

The numbers are still there for her on social media, but they might as well be empty eggs and spambots. She has the dubious honor of being just about the only Fox News alumnus who hasn’t announced as a candidate for the Republican nomination, the clown car reaching official overcapacity next week when Chris Christie crams himself into the race. Most tellingly, unlike in years past, there is no fan base or astroturf movement clamoring for Palin to jump into the fray as the Tea Party’s Furiosa—no one claiming that she is the only warrior queen capable of defeating Hillary Clinton in the dusty field of battle that will be converted into a FEMA internment camp, should Hillary prevail. How fickle our political culture. Palin seduced the party and its pundits—her camera wink during the 2008 vice-presidential debate had National Review editor Rich Lowry seeing “little starbursts”—and now she has been abandoned, a brittle relic of yesteryear.

The irony is that Palin’s incoherence as a thinker and speaker—her ability to toss a word salad at the slightest prompting—has set the tone and tempo for the Republican contenders that have so far taken the field and are wandering around with their helmets on sideways. Donald Trump, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, Rand Paul—their message discipline and mental rigor seems to be held together with old garter belts. Even a supposed pro such as Jeb Bush is betraying a lot of rust that’s accrued from years of not campaigning and enjoying his post-gubernatorial complacency.

Incoherence is the prevailing pathology of contemporary conservatism and the Republican party, and it’s only going to intensify into greater idiocracy in the years ahead as its chief enforcers of doctrine, bluster, and counterattack tactics—the cigar-toking Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes—sink into the sunset, leaving no heirs behind worthy of their bacon.

Fox News chief Roger Ailes has just had his contract renewed but at 75 he’s puffing to the foreseeable end of the junction, and his role as Republican kingmaker may not have recovered from Fox News’s election-night debacle of 2012. Ailes may even be privately pulling for Hillary Clinton to win. A new Clinton administration would feed a lot more peanuts to Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly than a Jeb Bush or Scott Walker presidency.