The latest CNN poll shows Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz as the three medalists (right now) in the Republican nomination. That's two not-actual-politicians who've spent years cultivating support among the right-wing fringes of society, plus one actual Senator practically every member of whose own party hates his guts. The three of them together are getting 66% of the primary vote right now. That's two-thirds of Republican voters, planning right now to vote for one of the three craziest candidates in the race. If Marco Rubio were to consolidate the Christie, Bush, Fiorina, Kasich, and Paul supporters, he'd be at a whopping 25%. There's a real inmates-running-the-asylum feeling here. And I know why.
The big story of American political history, well, since the Civil War at least, is what I like to call the Great Inversion. In 1890, there were two political parties, each consisting of a sharply-drawn and entirely coherent faction. One party represented the northeast and the Pacific coast; the other was for the most part based in the South. You'll note that every word of those two sentences would be the same if I replaced the year with 2015. The only difference, of course, is which was the Democrats and which the Republicans. During the interim the two parties switched places, Democrats shifting from the party of John C. Calhoun to that of Barack Obama, while the Republicans went from the party of Lincoln to the party of, well... evidently Donald Trump. And all through the middle of that time period, things were messy.
The mess started with the Populists, a movement in the 1890s that came from somewhat outside the existing partisan spectrum (Democrats and Republicans were both pretty conservative around then), ultimately becoming absorbed by the Democrats when they nominated William Jennings Bryan. It continued with the Progressives during the early years of the 20th century, and this time both parties succumbed to the craze (e.g. Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt). That may have been the beginning. Then, after a decade when both parties got a lot more conservative (e.g. 1924, when Calvin Coolidge faced off against John W. Davis, the guy who argued the wrong side in Brown v. Board), the Republicans spent a couple decades in the wilderness because of that whole "caused the Great Depression" thing. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal coalition included just about everyone. And that left the post-FDR Democrats, who had no chance of keeping Roosevelt's whole empire intact, with a choice: return to their white Southern roots or embrace the newfound support from African-American voters and become the party of civil rights. Under Harry Truman, they chose the latter path.
I don't know how much was already determined at that point; certainly the disturbances of the Populist and Progressive movements were necessary in making the choice possible in the first place. Once Lyndon Johnson repeated Truman's choice in signing the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, though, the next half-century was set squarely in motion. Southern whites were suddenly homeless; the party which had been theirs for a century had betrayed them in the worst way possible. Of course, they had long been making common cause with the conservative elements in the Republican Party anyway, the old Conservative Coalition, so now they just started actually calling themselves Republicans. But it took a while. The process wasn't complete, really, until 1994. And the process whereby the old Rockefeller Republicans realized that they, too, had been abandoned by their historic party, and latched onto the Democrats, wasn't really complete until around 2006. But for the last decade or so we've been back to having parties that make sense: all the conservatives on one side, all the liberals on the other.
So what does this have to do with Trump? It explains, I think, why it is only now possible for one party to be run by lunatics. Because you see, the lunatics have been there all along. Hell, there are fewer of them now than there've ever been. (As Chris Rock recently said, this country currently enjoys its nicest crop of white people ever.) And the boundary-lines of what makes you a lunatic have been shifting; bigotry of the sort that we decent liberal types can scarcely believe anyone would actually say out loud when Trump does so would've been more or less unremarkable fifty years ago. Certainly a century ago. But one thing is new, now: the fringe bigots are all in one party.
Because you see, they spent a century having been split up. Some of them, mostly in the South, were Democrats. Some of them, mostly in the North, were Republicans. And that means that the reactionary fringe had approximately the same proportion of each party's electorate (insofar as electorates were the real issue, back before the open primaries) as they did of the national electorate. Which, almost by definition, was pretty small. Not nearly enough to actually win elections. This meant that, in both parties, the non-crazy side could with something resembling regularity prevail. Or at the very least, you might have something like 1980, where Reagan won the Republican primary as the conservative candidate, and the candidate favored by the reactionary types, but not quite the candidate of the reactionary types. A coalition including the fringe loonies could win a primary, but it needed to compromise enough to pick up the support of the more middle-of-the-road sorts.
But now, now we've gone and sorted everything out. The parties make sense again. And that means that all the fringe reactionaries, all the hard-core bigots, they're all back under one big tent. And, surprise! It turns out that there are enough of them, there have always been enough of them, that if they're concentrated on one side of the aisle they can dominate that side. It doesn't take a lot; if we assume that 30% of the country is Republican, in the way that matters for the primary, then we're talking about 20% of the country. Think about it: do you really think that there's ever been less than 20% of this country that wasn't pretty thorough-goingly bigoted? In all the ways someone like Trump is currently playing to? The only thing that's different now is that they're all concentrated together. And that means they might actually get to seize the reigns of the party.
This is basically the Republican Death Spiral hypothesis, or at least it fits into it. Everything about Nate Silver's predictions from back in 2009 looks good except for, well, the idea that it would lead to Republicans losing things. Frankly I'm not sure why that hasn't happened. Sluggish economy combined with voters being stupid in all the ways that leading political science models predict? Something about the way the media isn't up to the task of dealing with a party this deranged? The influence of gerrymandering, of vote suppression, of Citizens United? I don't know. But I do know that the descent of the Republican Party into madness, or at least what seems like madness to those of us who think the correct side won the Civil War, is the pretty predictable result of taking the small remnant of the country that just flat-out does not believe in modern liberal egalitarianism, at all, and sticking it in one party. Bit by bit they take over. They force out everyone else, and then there's no one else left to steer the ship.
Everything we know about political science says Donald Trump should not win this nomination. Hell, it would've said the same thing about Ted Cruz a couple of months ago. But our political science grew up during the twentieth century, when nothing about partisan politics really made sense. That kind of disguised the fact that American is a country with an awful lot of pretty reprehensible people in it. And I'm not sure anyone is really prepared to deal with the fact that those people are now in a position to run one of our two major political parties.
I'd like to think they'll run it into the ground. Back in 2009 I would've been fairly confident they would. Right now all I can do is hope.
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