Roy Moore’s victory in Alabama’s Republican primary last week puts him in position to become the state’s next junior senator and also a major embarrassment to the GOP. Moore, after all, is considered too far right even by Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association, both of whom joined the party establishment in backing Moore’s opponent, outgoing Senator Luther Strange. Moore believes “homosexual conduct should be illegal,” that former President Barack Obama isn’t a natural-born citizen (yes, still), and that Muslims such as Congressman Keith Ellison shouldn’t be allowed to hold public office. If he defeats Democrat Doug Jones, as expected, Moore will be the most extreme conservative in the U.S. Senate.

Even worse for the Republicans, Moore is likely not to be alone in his extremism, but rather the crest of a new wave of candidates who are more Trumpist than Trump himself and motivated by a deep hatred of establishment Republicans like Senate Majority Mitch McConnell. At least that’s the hope of former White House adviser Steve Bannon and his political allies, who backed Moore toward a larger goal of unseating the Republican leadership moving the party in a more nationalist direction. As The New York Times reports, “Republicans are confronting an insurrection on the right that is angry enough to imperil their grip on Congress, and senior party strategists have concluded that the conservative base now loathes its leaders in Washington the same way it detested President Barack Obama.”

All this talk of insurrection within the GOP is leading some pundits to predict the demise of the Republican Party. Conservative radio host Charlie Sykes worried that, per the title of his recent Time column, “Roy Moore signals the end of the Republican Party.” The GOP “is locked in an endless feedback loop as it tries with diminishing success to placate its most bombastic voices,” Sykes wrote. “The most obvious consequence is their inability (so far) to legislate. But in the longer term, we are seeing the crack-up of one of the nation’s two major political parties.” Trygve Olson, a former adviser to Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, told The Atlantic there could be a “fracturing” of the Republican coalition, arguing that “if this eruption is about differences in core values, which I believe is the case, it becomes hard for coalition members that don’t share any underlying values to stay together.” And liberal columnist Heather Digby Parton echoed these sentiments, although in a more positive spirit, speculating that the GOP was “headed for the long-awaited crack-up.”

These predictions of Republican doom have a certain superficial plausibility. It’s hard to imagine how the GOP can remain a viable national party if it embraces figures like Moore even as the American public becomes much more socially liberal. While Moore might win in red-state redoubts like Alabama, surely his virulent homophobia will make the GOP as a whole toxic in most of America? Such speculation make sense in theory, but isn’t borne out by recent political experience. The Republican Party isn’t cracking up under the stress of increased extremism; in fact, it seems to be getting only stronger.

There’s a reason why Parton described the expected Republican crack-up as “long-awaited.” There is a long history of analysts predicting the demise of one of the two major parties. In recent memory, the Tea Party wave of 2010 was allegedly making the GOP unelectable, and Trump’s extremism in 2016, especially on racial issues, was supposed to doom his presidential hopes. But like Samuel Beckett’s Godot, the Republican crack-up is always due to arrive, but never does.