Like Marty McFly, Washington Post columnist George Will has gone “Back to the Future,” and found there, not his parents as teens, but William F. Buckley, parent to the modern conservative movement, warning his flock that Sen. Barry Goldwater was on the fast track to failure, and the movement should save what it could.

In 2012, as Will says, it is deja vu redux, with the Republican nominee leading the party to hopeless oblivion. Can this be true, or is his time machine faulty? Here are four reasons to think that it is: