Portraying himself as a no-nonsense businessman and an anti-politician unafraid to speak his mind (even if his mind changes), and practicing a calculated politics of insult, Donald Trump has racked up early, important wins in the GOP nominating contest. He now has establishment Republicans worrying how his reckless, bellicose style will go down in the fall if, as seems likely, he becomes the party’s nominee. Some Republicans have been quoted recently calling for a brokered convention, reminiscent of the days when a political party could set aside the popular vote and select someone less divisive or more electable than the frontrunner. For that is how the two major political parties used to work. About a dozen times in the twentieth century, parties nominated candidates who were not the top primary vote winners—including William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, Adlai Stevenson, and Hubert Humphrey—because they were deemed the best suited to lead the party’s ticket to victory.

But beginning in 1972, the two parties began reforming their delegate systems to remove party and elected officials from their role in vetting presidential nominees at national conventions. Politicians were sidelined, and ordinary voters were empowered in a series of sequential primaries and caucuses. As a result, today he or she who wins the most delegates chosen (directly and indirectly) in sequential contests becomes the nominee, crowned at the national conventions.

This system, of course, has the merits of transparency and apparent democracy. It has led to some 50 million voters participating in the nominating process. But the reforms have also unfolded in unforeseen ways with calamitous results. Party adherents have become bystanders to a process that incongruously results in the selection of their own leader. The so-called nominating convention, which used to be an occasion of decision—when people bargained, pressured, deliberated, and decided—now is no more than a televised spectacle.

RNC Chairman Reince Preibus has even found himself chasing Trump to get him to pledge that he would support the Republican nominee. It used to be candidates sought the endorsement of the party; now it’s the other way around.

Today the main drivers of the nominating process are the candidates, who select themselves to run. This self-selection is a problem. The modern process of running for president—24 months of nonstop fundraising, travel, and relinquished privacy—is so unpleasant and degrading that it requires something like a personality disorder to submit to it. When Ted Cruz’s former college roommate said he would rather see as president someone plucked from the phone book than his former roommate, he was putting his finger on a deeper problem than just one man’s personality. Rather than a selection process, we have an adverse selection: The individuals volunteering for president are often precisely the persons you would never want in that office.