II.

Republicans have been quarrelling about who they are since conservative icon William F. Buckley labelled a far-right faction of the party “kooks” more than half a century ago. But you don’t need to go back that far to understand how the party came to its current existential crisis.

It begins with the Republicans’ watershed victory in 2000, and the election of George W. Bush. For the first time in nearly 50 years, the GOP had won the White House and both houses of Congress. After decades of blaming Democrats for big government and Washington’s culture of entitlement, they suddenly owned it all and had the power to fix it.

(Kari Minchin/CBC)

But as sometimes happens in party politics, it’s at the moment of maximum advantage when things begin to turn south. By the most important measures, the Bush era was a gruelling time for America. It ended with the country mired in two foreign wars, hugely in debt and with an economy circling the drain into the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

Large swaths of grassroots Republicans looked at what their party had done and felt angry, embarrassed and betrayed. But they were also in an unprecedentedly strong position to act on those feelings.

Through gerrymandering, demographic shifts and media tribalism, significant numbers of Republican voters had clustered geographically in places where they were safely isolated from Democrats. Without Democrats to fight, party discipline broke down and they fought among themselves. It was at once empowering and destructive.

In district after district, grassroots Republicans confronted the party’s establishment with new demands on the people they elected to Washington. They insisted on ideological purity, meaning limited government and maximum individual freedom (except in social matters).

Republicans who had expected an easy ride to Washington were abruptly taken off the battlefield by primary challengers who were the flag-bearers of a new insurgency: The Tea Party. In the 2010 election, the Tea Party ran 138 candidates on the Republican ticket, and about a third of them were elected, including future luminaries such as senators Rand Paul and Marco Rubio.

By 2015, the anti-establishment had its own minority group — the staunchly conservative Freedom Caucus — to bully the party leadership on Capitol Hill. It was hard enough to manage when Republicans were opposing Barack Obama’s agenda, but with Trump in the White House, the result has been utter dysfunction — a party too riven by discord to govern.

Their truculence has come fully into view this year as the party again has control of the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, yet failed again and again to make good on seven years of promises to repeal and replace Obamacare.

Steve Bannon, who was Trump’s chief White House strategist before leaving in August, saw opportunity in the health-care failure, an opening to frame the party’s leadership as an obstruction to the Trump agenda. Bannon decided to make Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell the enemy of the base.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has been instrumental in destabilizing Republican establishment figures such as Mitch McConnell. (Mary F. Calvert /Reuters)

It was a bold assault on the Republican establishment, and Bannon tested it in the Senate primary in Alabama this September.

McConnell’s man in that race — the establishment’s man — was Luther Strange, the sitting senator who’d been appointed to fill Jeff Sessions’s seat when the latter became Trump’s attorney general. Trump backed Strange, in part to avoid a public fight with McConnell, with whom relations were already troubled. But Bannon backed Roy Moore, an extraordinarily reactionary choice who was the more Trumpian candidate, and the eventual winner.

Moore is a 70-year-old former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama and a fundamentalist Christian who believes that the Bible is the highest law of the land. He was twice removed from the bench for defying the constitution, is anti-gay and anti-Muslim as well as an Obama birther conspiracist.

By winning in Alabama, Moore showed the old Republican Party the terms of engagement in its civil war — and what their new Trump party will look like. A super PAC (political action committee) run by Steven Law, a former chief of staff for McConnell, spent millions trying to stop Moore and couldn’t.

In a memo late in the race, Law offered an analysis of Trump’s hold on the party: