We shouldn’t be asking whether the GOP is falling apart. We ought to be wondering why it isn’t.
The parties have historically been structured to accommodate racism and racial conflict. Neither one was created with our current norms about racial equality in mind. If a new party were founded today, we might expect that it would have goals like addressing racial inequality or income inequality in a modern economy, or developing a workable immigration system. Both parties have some ideas about these things, but they’re often shoehorned into policy and ideological agendas inherited from years ago. New issues are often foisted onto coalitions
.. Geography and state representation still play a role in the American political system. But when the first conventions were held, New York had a population of about 200,000. A system developed today might do even more to represent Americans by age, gender or ethnic background
.. yoking together seemingly unrelated ideas—gun control, tax reform and health care, for example—in ways that make it impossible for any of them to move forward
.. as the Democratic coalition has become more diverse and reliant on voters who are people of color, Democratic state parties have run into some criticism for celebrating Jefferson-Jackson Day—usually an annual fundraising gala that celebrates two historic, slave-owning Democrats, hosted by a party that now prides itself on embracing racial equality.
.. The Democrats have long been a party of process. The early party included members who disagreed on slavery, westward expansion and tariffs.
.. The Republican Party, meanwhile, has long been a party of ideology, created in the 1850s with a much more specific guiding principle in mind: stopping the expansion of slavery. Ever since, that difference—one party, a pragmatic alliance; the other, an ideological one—has meant that the Republican Party is more prone to ideological fights blowing up into potential existential crises.
.. The Republican Party, meanwhile, has long been a party of ideology, created in the 1850s with a much more specific guiding principle in mind: stopping the expansion of slavery. Ever since, that difference—one party, a pragmatic alliance; the other, an ideological one—has meant that the Republican Party is more prone to ideological fights blowing up into potential existential crises.
.. In the 1890s, the party emerged from a struggle over economic policy with a populist agenda and presidential candidate—William Jennings Bryan, who would win the party’s presidential nomination for the first of three times in 1896.
.. In 1948, Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey (then running for a U.S. Senate seat) and FDR’s own successor, Harry Truman, saw the possibility of bringing together moral principles and electoral gain by making the Democrats the party of civil rights. This didn’t go over well with everyone. Civil rights drove a wedge straight through the party’s North-South coalition.
.. a group of moderate Democrats organized under the banner of the Democratic Leadership Council to promote an approach to governing that was neither liberal nor conservative, but rather a “third way.” This movement culminated with the presidency of Bill Clinton, whose support for traditionally Republican stances like welfare reform led some on the left to question what the Democratic Party stood for at all.
.. the surprise success of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign suggests some pent-up demand for a more ideologically committed Democratic Party devoted to clearer principles of social provision, income equality and a noninterventionist foreign policy.
The Party Still Decides
Trump, though, is cut from a very different cloth. He’s an authoritarian, not an ideologue, and his antecedents aren’t Goldwater or McGovern; they’re figures like George Wallace and Huey Long
.. A man so transparently unfit for office should not be placed before the American people as a candidate for president under any kind of imprimatur save his own. And there is no point in even having a party apparatus, no point in all those chairmen and state conventions and delegate rosters, if they cannot be mobilized to prevent 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate from imposing a Trump nomination on the party.
.. What Trump has demonstrated is that in our present cultural environment, and in the Republican Party’s present state of bankruptcy, the first lines of defense against a demagogue no longer hold.
.. But the party’s convention rules, in all their anachronistic, undemocratic and highly-negotiable intricacy, are also a line of defense, also a hurdle, also a place where a man unfit for office can be turned aside.