Well before Republicans officially lost the 2012 election, leaders of the party, along with Mitt Romney’s campaign strategists and countless conservative opinion-makers, understood just how damaging the presidential nominating process had been for them. The gravest damage came from an unconstrained series of 20 debates, which pit candidates against each other in a madcap dash to win the hearts of audiences that booed gay soldiers and cheered at the notion that society should allow uninsured citizens to die.

Along the way, the eventual nominee gained notoriety for an agenda that included privatizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency, squeezing unauthorized immigrants into discomfort until they self-deported, and for offering an underdog a $10,000 bet.

After the election, the Republican National Committee set about sanding off the party’s rough edges. It encouraged Republicans to pass immigration reform and soften their rhetorical tropes, and in so doing repair the party’s relationship with a younger, more diverse segment of the electorate. It also set about tightening the rules governing primary debates—to limit the total number of them, exclude certain networks and moderators, and penalize candidates for circumventing the process. By doing so, the RNC hoped the party could escape its own primary without incurring the self-inflicted wounds it suffered in 2012.

Thursday’s Fox News debate represents the failure of that effort. The RNC, led by Reince Priebus, succeeded only in holding the number of debates to seven, which is still enough exposure time to wash out the kinder, gentler image he wants the party to project.

The complete explanation for the failure is complex, but it stems from the fact that the GOP (partially by design) has become dominated by reactionaries and ideologues, rather than by allied factions amenable to compromise. That explains both Donald Trump’s emergence as a towering Republican figure, and the influence Fox News has over the party. Both of those factors, in turn, explain why Thursday’s debate, and perhaps debates to come, will bear so much resemblance to the 2012 debates Priebus hoped to vanquish.