George Bush Jr and George Bush Sr.

The Republican National Committee has produced an “autopsy” on what went wrong in 2012, when the party failed to win the White House and lost seats in Congress.

Yet, the crisis of the Grand Old Party goes back much further.

First, some history. The Frank Lloyd Wright of the New Majority was Richard Nixon, who picked up the pieces of the party after Goldwater’s defeat had left Republicans with just a third of the House and Senate.

In 1966, Nixon led the GOP back to a stunning victory, picking up 47 House seats. In 1968, he united the Rockefeller and Reagan wings and held off an October surge by Hubert Humphrey, which cut a 13-point Nixon lead to less than a point in four weeks.

In 1972, Nixon swept 49 states. The New Majority was born. How did he do it?

Nixon sliced off from FDR’s New Deal coalition Northern Catholics and ethnics—Irish, Italians, Poles, East Europeans—and Southern Christian conservatives. Where FDR and Woodrow Wilson had won all 11 Southern States six times, Nixon swept them all in ‘72. And where Nixon won only 22 percent of the Catholic vote against JFK, he won 55 percent against George McGovern in 1972.

What killed the New Majority?

First, there was mass immigration, which brought in 40 to 50 million people, legal and illegal, poor and working class, and almost all from the Third World. The GOP agreed to the importation of a vast new constituency that is now kicking the GOP into an early grave.

When some implored the party in 1992 to secure the border and declare a “timeout” on legal immigration to assimilate the millions already here, the party establishment repudiated any such ideas.

“We are a nation of immigrants!” it huffed. Well, we sure are now.

And when amnesty is granted to the 12 million illegals, as GOP senators are preparing to do, that should advance the death of the GOP as a national party by turning Colorado, Nevada and Arizona blue, and putting even Texas in play.

Second came party acquiescence in dropping half the nation off the income tax rolls, while making half dependent on government for food assistance, income support, rent, health care and the education of their kids from Head Start through Pell Grants.

Why should the half of America that pays no taxes but survives on federal benefits vote for a party that will cut taxes they do not pay but roll back benefits upon which they do depend?

Third, to accommodate its K Street bundlers, the GOP embraced globalism, empowering Corporate America to shed its U.S. labor force, move its plants to Mexico, Asia and China, bring its foreign-made goods back to the USA free of charge and pocket the difference.