Sarah Palin is not a subliterate, divisive, redbaiting, culturally retarded ignoramus. She just plays one on television.

But the role won her a big following: In a recent poll she led all contenders for the Republican nomination in 2012.

That should be good news for the Democrats, no?

It would lead to the rapid breakup of the Grand Old Party and its reduction to permanent minority status. Unless, of course, the Obama Administration screws up in a major way and destroys its own new coalition of the winning.

Republican success in the Cold War’s aftermath and the new Bush wars to follow were based on several different and sometimes conflicting constituencies united for victory.

There were the genuine small-government, low-tax, Main Street economic conservatives and the deregulationist, even greedy Wall Street conservatives. There were the religious-right cultural conservatives—mainly Evangelicals—who made common cause with conservative Catholics. There were the race-reactive southerners and working-class whites who left the Democratic Party during the Civil Rights era. Then the small but influential batch of neoconservative intellectuals with plans to reshape global politics by imposing their brand of democracy on the Middle East, with a major pro-Israel rationale. Plus a core of genuine libertarians.

Obviously the groups overlapped, but they were not all natural allies. Wall Streeters could snicker at the Evangelicals; some neocons and libertarians might be pro-choice. But they all hung together because winning was all-important, even as they watched government grow bigger and bigger, even under godhead Ronald Reagan; even as the unifying Cold War was replaced with an endless war on terror; even as they saw the Constitution shredded by the Bush-Cheney gang, which genuinely bothered true constitutional conservatives.

I know ardent right-to-life proponents who were prepared to support pro-choice Rudy Giuliani back in prehistoric days when he was ahead in the polls. (I’ll bet Rudy has a little more respect for community organizers these days!)

Bush devastated the Republican brand and the coalition ruptured during the campaign: many blue-collar “Reagan Democrats” returned to their party of origin on economic grounds; neocons were discredited; Wall Street melted down; many Evangelicals felt used; Palin disgusted the intellectuals; a flailing McCain campaign embarrassed almost everyone and Republicans of conscience began asking themselves, “Who are we and what do we really stand for?”

I wrote last week of the emergent Democratic majority, which I expect to last a generation or two. This is its corollary—the makings of a permanent Republican minority.

How ironic that the party born to put an end to slavery should face extinction with the election of the first African American president!

What next?

Will the GOP be reduced to a regional entity—holding forth in the last of the slave states plus scatterings in the Great Plains and Big Sky country?

Will it remain a national party in name only, winning primarily in rural areas—Palin’s “real America”?

Or will there be an eventual realignment—sort of a European configuration of ideologically conservative and liberal parties? Maybe a third centrist party drawing from both?

These are premature musings, but I have seen some of the future in Illinois—and it gives me pause. The Republican Party has no pulse in Chicago. In the rest of Cook County’s 30 suburban townships—once a significant GOP repository—the party is dwindling. Most Republican candidates for county and state office lose the cumulative suburban-Cook vote.

As a result, the Chicago Machine dominates everything and we have one of the worst county board presidents and other administrative officials in world history. Okay—I exaggerate. In United States history.

Illinois is virtually a one-party state as well, with a governor winning the race to the bottom.

A more viable two-party system would force the Democrats to come up with better choices. When we were a two-party state the old Machine was forced to “perfume the ticket” with candidates such as Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson II and Sen. Paul Douglas.

In later years, the Cook County GOP might slate a competent, progressive “liberal Republican” for board president or prosecutor against a total Machine hack. There were enough Republicans in the suburbs to join with ticket-splitting independent and progressive Democrats to have an informal “fusion” campaign that could beat the Machine now and then.

That’s how, in 1972, we defeated Edward Hanrahan, the prosecutor responsible for the assassination of Black Panther Fred Hampton. Not likely to happen again.

So even if the Republicans collapse totally, progressives may still have something to kvetch about. But then, we always do, don’t we?