Donald Trump is not really exceptional among current Republican presidential candidates. He is the one with the brightest plumage, of course, and the one who has had long experience at cultivating celebrity. If Trump seems strangely incapable of consistency except in the matter of walling out and deporting immigrants, somber Ted Cruz is lurking nearby to alarm us with his ideological purity. If Trump is his own invention, there is Rubio, the polished creature of hired advisors and their moment-to-moment calculations.



The only satisfaction to be found in a Trump win lies in the fact that the others have lost, and lost badly. On the other hand, Trump’s bluster distracts attention from the others’ stated positions, so if one of his competitors manages finally to make the case, to the public or the party, that he is least objectionable, the claim might well be groundless.



Trump and the others are the product of the souring of the party system. Someone should point out, in these days when the constitution is so constantly and pietistically invoked, that political parties are not mentioned in the constitution, and that the prescient founders warned emphatically against them for reasons that should be clear to us now.



In recent years the Republicans have hardened into a faction, by which I mean a congeries of population groups who define themselves primarily as the adversaries of Democrats. Traditionally the parties had, for the most part, served as advocates for regions and interests that endorsed them by their votes – farmers, workers, business people and so on.

Since Nixon, the southern strategy and the culture wars, the tactics of the Republicans have been to stigmatize the Democrats by association with disfavored groups, so that their championing of the rights of minorities, and of women, of immigrants and the poor, together with their support of marriage equality, triggered the kind of quasi-moral distaste many people the world over feel toward the disfavored. This might seem to be at odds with the Christianity the party so loudly claims for itself.



But it does explain what might otherwise seem puzzling, that the many Evangelicals among them are perfectly wiling to overlook every transgression in Trump’s past and every crudeness and cruelty in his present conduct, and also to forgive in anticipation whatever future sin might be entailed in breaking up immigrant families or fomenting conflict abroad. They ask nothing of him except that he win.



The press describes the Trump phenomenon as a rejection of the political establishment. Who exactly the establishment are at this point is difficult to say. The supreme court, at the moment a sadly politicized institution, decided, to the delight of our so-called conservatives, that money is speech, therefore that constraints on its influence on elections were unconstitutional. So now, when some drab functionary presents himself as speaking for the party, he is no more than scurf on a sea of money handed out by any opinionated casino magnate. The party has effectively marginalized itself.



In fact, the Republican situation is such a tangle of unintended consequences that it is impossible to sort it all out, or to make the attempt without laughing. They re-jiggered their primary system to enhance party influence in choosing a candidate, and Trump, the great orange-haired Unintended Consequence, has played their innovations like a fiddle.



For years they have gerrymandered districts to make them “safe” for their representatives in Congress, thereby incubating a culture of politicians who are too odd and extreme – and white – to appeal to a national electorate. Their restrictions on voting can be expected to have the same effect.



In other words, they have seized one kind of power at the cost of another, and in the process exacerbated every demographic problem that threatens their future as a national party. True, their strategy of party discipline, which may make their congressional leadership the nearest thing they have to an establishment, is so potent that the senator from Kentucky can tell the senator from Maine how she is to vote, or that she must not vote. So much for representative government.



The joke is, of course, that this rigid discipline is all in the service of paralysis. They will not so much as take note of the President’s nomination to fill a vacant seat on the supreme court, which he is constitutionally required to make. This will leave the court divided four to four, paralyzed, in all probability, which is clearly nothing that perturbs these persons still quaintly referred to as lawmakers.



Perhaps the public is exasperated to the point that it is enjoying a kind of catharsis, the indiscriminate smashing of things as performance art. Trump will probably learn that ridicule is an effective servant but a terrible master, since he is objectively ridiculous, his career is murky at best and the campaign will be passionate and long.



His supposed implausibility as a candidate actually sheltered him for months from scrutiny by the press, who nevertheless have showered him with attention. He is alarming as well as absurd, stirring and stoking the worst impulses in the electorate. But then this is only a darkening of the atmosphere we have lived in since Nixon, as fear and resentment began to be commodified very profitably by the likes of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.



Trump has stepped right out of the fusion of news and entertainment, out of the gothic fantasy world of sinister foreigners and imminent catastrophe, a fact that may have made him less bizarre to their viewers and listeners than the rest of us were ready to understand.



Trump supporter sucker-punches black protester at rally

We cannot know, and I shudder to think, how deeply these influences have conditioned public consciousness. Their penetration of the Republican electorate – their sympathies are always Republican – are on display in the campaigns of Cruz and Rubio as well as Trump, since, in turning right, the party stepped into their arms. This is another calculation gone bad. Nativism and resentment have a dangerous momentum of their own.



Now party leaders are scrambling to put distance between themselves and the Ku Klux Klan. We have a measure of their effect in the panic felt in some quarters by the mere fact of President Obama, a wise, humane and moderate soul if ever there was one, who has come almost to the end of his two terms, having put the country in a vastly better state than he found it in, and this despite everything his opposition could do to thwart the will of the majorities who elected him.



Watching Trump’s victories mount up as I write, I comfort myself with the fact that all that red overspreading the map means only that he has won pluralities among the minority of voters who take part in primaries. It may well mean that the Republican party will indeed be saddled with a candidate the national electorate is certain to find unacceptable.



In any case, American elections are long and grueling, just as they ought to be. We will spend months learning how things are with us. This is good and necessary, especially now when divisions in the society are deepening. They are deepening not only because of the stresses of the new economy, which a functioning government would meliorate, or the threats brought on by global disorder, which must be managed and will be, but because fear, anxiety and resentment are the stock in trade of important media and the politicians allied or symbiotic with them.