They've a very long way to go before they can ever be a serious political party, never mind a political force, again. But whose to say what a few generations of "shut up and sit down: you had your chance and absolutely blew it" will do to an ideology.
Texas is creeping toward blue. Georgia voted for Biden and showed black people in Alabama and Mississippi that going to the polls is worth a shot. The GOP is going to be having a lot of trouble getting their backbone states in the Senate and White House. The day Texas goes blue or has a near miss, you are going to see a dynamic shift in the party platforms. A whole lot of issues that have been contended for years but are no longer working are going to see the Democratic position becoming good old America values. Climate Change is going to be one of them. Already Republicans are trying to maneuver to the other side on that and Trump's populism showed the path. Big Business is who is really opposed to climate change work and the GOP is not really ringing their bell like they used to.
Same here, but when I honestly look back on it, when were they better? Bush W, not really, listened to the same folks that his dad and Reagan did. Bush Sr, nope. Reagan, started the process to destroy the middle class. Ford? Maybe? Nixon, definitely not.
We're talking about two different things, I guess. Politics have always been politics and there have always been things going on that we didn't know about and of course the parties have always disagreed about what needed to be done and how to do it than we do.
If you want to know when they were better than THIS, they were ALWAYS better than THIS.
The Clinton impeachment may have been the start of the "We will do whatever it takes to embarrass the other party" thing. They still looked like grownups, at least to me, at that point. They looked like grownups through W. You don't have to agree with what a grownup is doing for them to be a grownup. Tea Party was probably the beginning of the "we will hold the government hostage over our pet issue even if we know we can't win" stuff. Even there, guys like Ted Cruz were looking slimy but it didn't occur to me where things were going. Gaetz and Tayler-Green and Santos are outright clowns. That is pretty new.
It is a pretty new thing to have people in the House of Representatives who, despite having only 2 years before needing to be reelected, are public with the fact that their goal is to keep anything from happening because their party is in the minority and the other party cannot be allowed to pass legislation. It is pretty new for the Senate to say, "No, we won't have a vote on your nominees."
Something people always don't want to talk about nowadays is that Reagan won in landslides. Carter won 6 states and DC. Mondale got Minnesota and DC, 13 Electoral votes. This despite the country giving a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives EVERY TIME. Reagan never had a Republican House of Representatives. A huge number of Democrats agreed that he was on the right track at the polls and in Congress, at the very least, he was able to make deals. They were cooperating. The Democrats talking about Reagan now are mostly not the same Democrats that were there at the time, but it isn't really fair to just say the GOP was running the table.