MY PRINT column this week argues that the Republican Party's big problem is not that it just lost the race for the White House. The real problem for conservatives is that they did not lose the 2012 election cycle badly enough. Political parties sliding into a long-term, structural crisis typically only start to climb after a brutal defeat or—usually—defeats.

My column considers all manner of comforting arguments that explain why the Republicans did not have such a bad night on November 6th, or might find it easier than expected to avoid the demographic trap made visible by Mr Obama's win.

Such arguments are not wholly wrong, but miss two large problems facing Republicans. First, after months of reporting from campaign rallies and congressional campaigns in nearly a dozen states, I suggest that the average Republican activist tends to be angrier and more pessimistic than the average American, and unhappy about how the country is changing.

What is more, too many members of the Republican base are keen on theories that explain away inconvenient or dismaying facts, often crafted by conservative media outlets. Mr Romney's slogan was "Believe in America". Too many on his side seemed to want to believe in a very specific version of America, and disbelieve discordant facts and arguments.

Both these problems matter. For one thing, it is hard for a party to win national elections in a country that it palpably seems to dislike. For another, it is hard for a party to navigate a changing world if some core supporters insist that mainstream maps are wrong, because that world is actually flat.

One of the happy shocks of this week involved an early-morning hop from Iowa to Ohio on election day, so that I could interview voters emerging from polling stations in both red and blue neighbourhoods. Members of the public who said that they had voted for President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney had this in common: compared to the active partisans who go to campaign rallies, they were calm and considered in their assessment of the election—and strikingly bipartisan. Very few claimed a monopoly of wisdom for their candidate, or alleged a monopoly of wickedness on the other side. If anything summed up this unscientific sample it was disappointment with both candidates, and a strong desire to see politicians in Washington work pragmatically on getting stuff done.

A final note. The column is not an assessment of the policy platforms of the two candidates, it is a specific argument about internal dynamics within the conservative movement, as observed at election rallies, in Republican Party county headquarters and field offices, at coffee mornings or drinks in supporters' homes and businesses and in private conversations with congressmen and officials on the campaign trail.

Democratic partisans have their foibles. They can be tribal, and prone to conspiracy theories about the rich and powerful, and too trusting in the power of governments to fix things. But, on average, Republican partisans come across as dismayingly pessimistic. They pay lip service to the idea that they need to change their policies to take account of such forces as demographic shifts. But when pressed they are not willing to contemplate hard or painful choices.

The Republican Party has not hit rock bottom yet. Perhaps they should have chosen a full-throated social conservative with strong grassroots appeal as their presidential candidate, and watched him lose more than 40 states, as such a candidate surely would have.

But for the moment, the grassroots of the Republican Party are reminiscent of the British Labour Party in the 1980s, as that party waged an internal war between the hard left and the first proto-Blairite reformers. One of the architects of the Blairite programme, Peter Mandelson, tells a story about an adversary from those days, a London local government leader and Trotskyite, whose battle cry was: "No compromise with the electorate". It is a slogan that might appeal to some on the American right.

America needs an effective opposition party, that is capable of and interested in making a case that reaches across the 50-50 divide. There is no reason why the Republican Party cannot fulfill that role soon. Plenty of thoughtful people in the party know they are drifting away from mainstream America. Alas, it may take a more stinging defeat to trigger that reckoning with reality.