TICKET FROM THE CRYPT

Staggering zombielike toward 2024, the GOP is cursed with a presidential front-runner whose influence has waned. But he still has his Republican challengers jumping at shadows.

- CHARLES P. PIERCE

ARCHAEOLOGISTS FROM NICOLAUS COPERNICUS UNIVERSITY EXCAVATED an interesting grave near the village of Pień in southern Poland last August. A woman had been buried there in the 17th century, laid in the grave faceup with the blade of a sickle across her throat, sharp side down, and a padlock fastened to her toe. The woman, archaeologists surmised, had been killed for being a vampire, and the elaborate interment was devised to keep her from rising again. If she sat up, the blade would instantly behead her. The padlock was largely symbolic, representing the efforts taken by the villagers to avoid a return engagement.

If only politics were so easy.

It's now almost five decades since the Republican party was first bedeviled by its own Undead: an Undead appetite for cruelty in public policy; an Undead attraction to the political use of fear and cultural bogeymen; and an Undead proclivity for causing the same damage, over and over again-running up crippling deficits, following the culture wars to inevitable extremes, and harboring a misbegotten devotion to Dear Leader, whether to Ronald Reagan and his magical supply-side America, or to George W. Bush and his crusade to turn every Middle Eastern despotism into Rhode Island at the point of an RPG, or (finally and most destructively) to Donald J. Trump, who lied worse than Reagan and had lousier foreign policy than Bush. The Undead followed with them all.

And as the putative Republican presidential candidates begin to emerge-Nikki Haley announced formally in February, Ron DeSantis has spent months announcing informally, and Tim Scott and Asa Hutchinson announced that they're pondering whether to announce at all-it has become obvious that they must contend with a powerful new faction of the Undead: the specter of the previous president of the United States.