The Opinion Pages |  CAMPAIGN STOPS

If Trump Breaks Up the G.O.P., It Won’t Be a First

By SEAN WILENTZ
A 1904 illustration showing President Theodore Roosevelt wearing an elephant costume labeled “Republican Party.” Library of Congress
Donald J. Trump has astounded the world, as he would be the first to tell you, leaving the Republican leadership to make the best of a terrible situation. Only months ago, Senator John McCain of Arizona, a professed maverick Republican, was berating Mr. Trump for inciting the fringe “crazies.” Now he backs the presumptive nominee. “I believe that the Republican Party must maintain its viability as a party,” he said.
But what if the Republicans are no longer a viable national party? What if the schism between Mr. Trump and establishment holdouts like Mitt Romney deepens, and other schisms follow? What if Mr. Trump’s achievement turns out to be not just hijacking the party of Ronald Reagan, but catalyzing its disintegration?
It might seem unthinkable, but we’ve been here before. Major-party crackups are rare in American history, but far from unprecedented. These convulsive events mark major phases in the long history of American democracy and its expansion.
And although none of the implosions are identical, they share elements with the current crisis inside the G.O.P., including nativism, political legitimacy and class. All of them resound with calls to make America great again, to reclaim a country that is on the verge of being stolen away.
The first momentous collapse occurred in the election of 1800, and nativism proved central to it. In order to suppress rising unruly democratic forces aligned with Thomas Jefferson, the dominant Federalist Party of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton stirred popular fears of a menacing enemy within, including immigrants friendly to the Jeffersonians.
The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 went after unnaturalized immigrants as well as opposition newspaper editors; Hamilton, an immigrant himself, called for their wholesale deportation, remarking that “the mass ought to be obliged to leave the country.” The hysteria eventually rattled moderate Federalists, including President Adams, and opened deep divisions inside the party, paving the way for Jefferson’s victory. The broken Federalist Party survived for a decade and a half more, but would never again hold the presidency or a majority in either house of Congress.
In the 1850s, abolitionist politicians proclaimed that American slavery had to be placed, as Abraham Lincoln declared, “in the course of ultimate extinction.” At the same time, mass immigration from Ireland and Germany was inflaming prejudice against Catholics.
In 1854 the Whigs, one of the two major parties, collapsed over slavery. But while some Whigs joined the antislavery cause, others switched to the nativist Know-Nothing or American Party, which for a time looked as if it would supplant the Whigs. Out of the chaos emerged a new antislavery party, the Republicans, which got Lincoln elected to the presidency in 1860. After the Union Army vanquished the slavocracy, the Republican Party went on to largely command national government and politics for nearly 70 years.
Early in the 20th century, economic and social change produced major reforms to rein in what President Theodore Roosevelt called “malefactors of great wealth.” After World War I, though, the old guard in the Republican Party, announcing a return of American greatness, regained the initiative, buoyed in part by a resurgent nativism that brought about the lawdrastically restricting immigration in 1924.
Yet when the crash of 1929 led to the Great Depression, conservatives had little to offer. The Republican supremacy collapsed in the election of 1932; the Democratic Party picked up the mantle of reform, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal shaped the contours of American government and politics for the next two generations. Between 1932 and 1968 only one Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, won the presidency, but even he acted to ratify a bipartisan New Deal consensus.
That consensus began to crack in the 1960s when Rockefeller Republicans lined up against conservatives devoted to curbing if not destroying decades of New Deal, civil rights and Great Society reforms.
The reaction peaked during the Reagan presidency. But Reagan and his party never consolidated a new political order, as Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt had done. To pursue such regressive old-guard policies as trickle-down economics, the Republican right provoked a culture war, instigating furious currents of resentment against social and cultural changes that were transforming American life: the expansion of an African-American middle class, profound changes in gender, sexual and family norms, and enormous immigration from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia enabled by a new immigration law enacted in 1965.
But the culture warriors failed to turn back the clock, and Reaganomics, intensified during the presidency of George W. Bush, fostered inequality and speculation. As that recklessness propelled the nation toward the financial crash of 2008, another political reckoning loomed.
The reckoning began to unfold with the election of Barack Obama, weeks after the crash, which signaled the impending defeat of the Republican culture war. By momentarily corralling the rebellious Tea Party movement, the Republicans regained control of the House in 2010, thereafter blocking much of the Obama White House’s agenda. But the strategy of paralysis, heightened when Republicans won the Senate majority in 2014, could not overshadow Mr. Obama’s two major achievements in his first two years, the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, when he worked with a Democratic Congress. Nor could the Republicans prevent Mr. Obama’s re-election in 2012.
As the 2016 elections approached, old and new fissures began to crack open. The party’s base, including Tea Party insurgents and evangelicals, had become furious with a Republican leadership powerless to halt the growing diversification, racial inclusiveness and cultural openness of American life, which it associated with Mr. Obama. At the same time, the party establishment had nothing to offer hard-pressed, working-class Republican voters except discredited bromides about tax cuts, deregulation and plans to slash Medicare and privatize Social Security.
In stepped Mr. Trump, who exploited the party’s internal weaknesses. He had already won favor with the base by joining with the “birthers” to attack Mr. Obama’s legitimacy as president. He opened his candidacy with a nativist outburst, assailing illegal immigration and calling Mexicans rapists and drug dealers, which fed the base’s economic and cultural discontent. But he also punctured the Republicans’ tattered economic orthodoxy, defending entitlements and blaming free trade for hollowing out the middle class.
Should Mr. Trump and his followers consolidate their control over the Republican Party, they will have converted it into something that Reagan would hardly recognize. But no matter how the power struggle is finally decided, it is clear that the party of Reagan’s era, uniting free market, small government conservatism with white working-class cultural fears and resentments, has come unglued — and no Republican leader or faction seems capable of putting it back together.
Mr. Trump’s railing against “political correctness” thrills his followers. His strutting, bullying style may seem new to Americans, but the promise of his campaign — “Make America Great Again” — is a recurrent echo. It is a cry that has been heard for 216 years in political parties on the verge of a historic crackup.
Sean Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton and the author, most recently, of “The Politicians and the Egalitarians: The Hidden History of American Politics.”