I have had some painful experience with what it feels like to have the central allegiance of one’s public life take place within a movement shared almost exclusively by angry, aging white men, who mistrust if not dislike women and are sadly hostile to highly visible black men. And I know what it feels like to perpetually insist that, appearances aside, the cause itself is not defined by the ugly racial suspicions and prejudices of some of its adherents. As a passionate hockey fan, in other words, I feel deeply for my conservative friends right now. They feel as we feel when a full-scale donnybrook breaks out on the ice, and our love of the game goes to war with our disgust.

But, hockey aside, I’ve also, as a sometime resident of France, been through this before. It was no surprise last week when Jean-Marie Le Pen, the former leader of France’s far-right National Front, endorsed Donald Trump. (“If I were an American, I would vote Donald Trump,” Le Pen tweeted.) The shared identity of the two political movements was merely being affirmed: extreme right-wing authoritarians whose core ideology is racist and anti-immigrant, coalescing around anti-Muslim rage (in Le Pen’s case, with the previous addition of anti-Semitism), and both strongly “corporatist,” i.e., not at all liberal but also not at all unfriendly to government welfare programs. It looks like the classic fascist double whammy, in plain English.

The difference, not insignificant, is that Le Pen, and to this day his daughter Marine, who inherited the party, are quarantined away from respectable conservatism. When Le Pen disastrously made the final round of the French Presidential election, in 2002, in a one-man race against the right-center candidate Jacques Chirac, a “republican front” was formed incorporating respectable conservatives and French Socialists, whose candidate, Lionel Jospin, had disappointed in the first round. Socialists who had spent their lives opposing Chirac, who thought him unprincipled, mediocre, and significantly corrupt, held their noses—some literally asked to take clothespins into the voting booths—and voted for him, and against Le Pen. They were operating on the wise premise that sometimes people who are mistaken about almost everything are better than someone who is wrong about the only thing that counts. There are politicians we strongly disagree with, and then there are anti-constitutional crypto-fascist authoritarians. Pretending they’re the same is what happened at Vichy, and it should never be allowed to happen again.

One of the great oddities, and tragedies, of American life, however, is that the extreme right has only been sporadically quarantined from the reasonable right. Having become accustomed to using the extreme right for non-extreme purposes, American Republicans seem to be in sporadic denial about the necessity of the American equivalent of a republican front, French-style. They engage in elaborate rituals of denial.

One way of shrugging off the horror is to insist that we are actually in the midst of a sort of national insurgency of the enraged, and that conservatives are getting blindsided by the same chaotic forces that will bring down liberalism, too. But there is no evidence at all that Democrats are, by historical measure, especially angry with their circumstances—or that they are, on the whole, anything but proud of their twice-elected President and prepared to support candidates who declare themselves close to him. Indeed, the central but somehow invisible political fact of this year of supposed anger and revolt and rebellion is this: if Barack Obama could run again, he would win again—perhaps even more easily than he did last time. In his enforced absence, Democrats are coalescing around his natural successor.

The next forms of denial are, first, to insist that Donald Trump is really the fault of the media—that a sensation-seeking shock circus has made a clown like Trump addictive and driven away grown-up discourse. And yet if successful politicians are now forced to become foul-mouthed circus acts, then how, again, did the most successful politician in twenty-first-century America somehow miss the memo? Obama’s eight-year demonstration of poise, imperturbable good humor, dry and sometimes biting wit—of elegance in argument and excellence in parenting—sucks up all the air from that argument. (The truly loony secondary logic that Obama is responsible because the very fact of his Presidency somehow enraged his opponents is the same logic that made African-Americans who didn’t know their place responsible for lynch mobs.)

No, this is what one might call a unicameral breakdown: one, and only one, of our major parties has been going crazy for twenty years and is now having a full-fledged gibbering, I’m-The-Emperor-of-Antarctica breakdown. It is hard not to feel just a touch of schadenfreude about this. The Republicans have served up eight years of hatred and nihilism—and now they are surprised to find they have inherited hatred and nihilism as they actually appear in the real world, not neatly blown-dry and smirking but red and orange and heaving, cursing and swearing and contemptuous. Republicans four years ago saw Trump offering the raw sewage of racism called “birtherism” and they giggled timidly and thought that, if diluted sufficiently with moderating water, it would somehow become potable. The chance to drive out Trump for good was Mitt Romney’s when, at no cost to him—and with the additional certainty of getting a disproportionate share of approval for minimal political courage—he could have rejected Trump’s support, instead of going to his hotel in Las Vegas to thank him for his endorsement. That tiny price proved too much to pay. And now they are surprised?

Various liberal types are recommending cross-voting for one of Trump’s Republican opponents where possible, but, wise or not, it seems too late for that. We are headed, in effect, toward the equivalent of that second round. The weirdest thing is that, at a moment when rational or far-sighted conservatives should be sighing with relief that the alternative to the monster they’ve created is a reasonable, experienced mainstream centrist whose chief fault in progressive eyes is that she is too close to the conservatives’ own ideology—at this moment when their entire movement is about to fall apart and be handed out to a bizarre cartoon villain—the habit of hatred still seems to overwhelm the rational need for a “republican front.” You would expect to see conservatives pensive and trying to walk back the crazy as rapidly as they can. But they can’t. The crazy is an addiction, the crazy is their language, the crazy is their life: the “Establishment” Marco Rubio insists that Obama is consciously trying to do harm to his country; Ted Cruz does, too, and says that the White House is protecting Hillary Clinton from being indicted as a criminal. The crazy has so penetrated the logic that it is hardly possible to make the separate case against the truly crazy. It is as if, with the Joker about to take over Gotham City, Commissioner Gordon would be worrying that Bruce Wayne is the real problem: he has too many parking tickets to be trusted. The same hysterical urge not to oppose or criticize Obama but to expose and humiliate and render him illegitimate is present in the conservative conversation about Hillary Clinton—she’ll be arrested! She’ll be indicted! She’ll be spanked!—this time with the sexual dimension embarrassingly blatant. It overwhelms rational calculation. Seeing this politicking as a theatre of shame and humiliation is probably smarter than seeing it as an efficient market of interests.