Julia Azari is an associate professor at Marquette University, the author of Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate and contributes to the Mischiefs of Faction blog on Vox.

To be a political scientist in the Trump era is to constantly ponder one big question: whether the Republican Party is in a state of collapse. Could the growing split over Donald Trump bring about the end of one of our major political parties?

The truth is that American politics doesn’t offer many points of comparison. The first two parties to vanish, the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Democrats, were proto-parties that lacked much of the organization that really makes parties succeed. A later party, the Whigs, which collapsed in the 1850s, was similarly loosely organized, and its members had decidedly mixed feelings about how things like patronage and campaigns should work.


Since the Republicans formed in 1856, the two major parties have bent but not broken. But, as incredulous commentators consider the possibility that 2016 could be the end of the GOP, they are missing the issue about which they should be most incredulous: Our two political parties are still, in some sense, vestiges of the parties they were in the 1850s. Despite changes in coalitions and ideology — to say nothing of revolutions like industrialization, the civil rights movement, women’s suffrage, two world wars, and the changing composition of the electorate — the two parties have proved immensely adaptable.

Asking whether the GOP is not long for this world is, in a sense, the wrong question. Here’s the right one: Are the parties too resilient for their own good?

Democracy needs political parties to function. But our two major parties have become constrained by holding onto more than 100 years of ideas, constituencies and practices that can come into conflict with what those parties need right now to be competitive.

Perhaps the starkest example of this is in the area of race relations: The parties have historically been structured to accommodate racism and racial conflict. Neither one was created with our current norms about racial equality in mind. If a new party were founded today, we might expect that it would have goals like addressing racial inequality or income inequality in a modern economy, or developing a workable immigration system. Both parties have some ideas about these things, but they’re often shoehorned into policy and ideological agendas inherited from years ago. New issues are often foisted onto coalitions that can’t agree on positions, much less solutions.

The convention system is another example. Nominating conventions have obviously changed over the years, but they’re based on a system developed in the 1830s. The main purpose of this system was to coordinate partisans across different states, and we still see each state delegation sitting with its big state sign at each party convention every four years. Geography and state representation still play a role in the American political system. But when the first conventions were held, New York had a population of about 200,000. A system developed today might do even more to represent Americans by age, gender or ethnic background (the parties have adopted reforms to ensure delegate representation along some of these lines), and to take into account the differences between Americans who live in urban and rural areas.

Though there’s some benefit to the stability of a longstanding system, the long, rigid reign of two parties also limits the flexibility of American politics, reducing complex national decisions to simple binary contests and yoking together seemingly unrelated ideas—gun control, tax reform and health care, for example—in ways that make it impossible for any of them to move forward

This problem also creates problems for the parties themselves, in ways big and small. On the small side, as the Democratic coalition has become more diverse and reliant on voters who are people of color, Democratic state parties have run into some criticism for celebrating Jefferson-Jackson Day—usually an annual fundraising gala that celebrates two historic, slave-owning Democrats, hosted by a party that now prides itself on embracing racial equality. For the Democratic Party, there’s a point at which celebrating the heroes of its troubled past jeopardizes its political necessities for the future.

For Republicans, the problem is more immediate and profound: The party’s history of ideological unity and organizational continuity will tie future Republicans to the Trump candidacy, regardless of efforts to distance themselves from his positions. The story of parties’ remarkable resiliency gives a sense of how they’ve survived so long, but also how their survival might prevent American politics from representing all citizens and facing modern challenges.

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Both of the major parties were originally created to solve problems. The Democrats were created to meet the challenge of coordinating candidates and their supporters across a vast, expanding, largely rural nation. The Democrats have long been a party of process. The early party included members who disagreed on slavery, westward expansion and tariffs. Yes, they had policy commitments—originally centered around limiting the federal government’s influence—but they were more a pragmatic alliance than an ideological crusade.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, has long been a party of ideology, created in the 1850s with a much more specific guiding principle in mind: stopping the expansion of slavery. Ever since, that difference—one party, a pragmatic alliance; the other, an ideological one—has meant that the Republican Party is more prone to ideological fights blowing up into potential existential crises.

Most of the time, the GOP has withstood these tensions, often emerging with greater electoral strength than before.

As an organization formed in opposition to the expansion of slavery, the Republican Party’s guiding purpose became less clear after the Civil War was won—much as its leadership became less clear after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. The period between the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction represents the first time the Republicans could have disintegrated. They were divided into many different factions, first over how harshly to treat the former Confederate states, then over whether to reform the system of patronage with a cleaner, more merit-based approach to civil service.

During this time, the GOP won a lot of elections, especially for the presidency (though not without some controversy), so it wasn’t that Republicans weren’t able to function as a political party. But lacking a central purpose, it’s impressive just how adaptable the Republican Party proved itself to be.

Part of the reason for this was the procedures it had in place. Strong norms about supporting the presidential ticket—and harsh consequences for not doing so—meant that state and local party leaders supported presidential candidates even when they disagreed with them. The party’s resilience in this era was also born out of necessity: Although Republicans won nearly every presidential election, the Democrats had an extensive electoral machine and the political battle down the ticket was incredibly competitive.

The second time the Republican Party might have ceased to exist was after the Great Depression. The name of Republican President Herbert Hoover became synonymous with poverty and want, and the party experienced record-level seat losses in 1930 and 1932. Starting in the 1930s, it was unclear exactly how to act like an opposition party in the face of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s popular New Deal programs and expanding coalition. Though the New Deal was not without its detractors (including the Supreme Court, congressional opponents and demagogic radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin), the Republican presidential nominee in 1936, Alf Landon, opted not to mount too strong an opposition to the basic ideas behind Roosevelt’s programs. The 1936 Republican National Convention featured clashes between Republicans who rejected the New Deal in principle as unconstitutional, and those, including Landon, who accepted some of its basic premises and sought efficient and effective implementation of new policies. The ideological contours of this fight would inform subsequent fights within the party.

This problem flared up again in the election of 1952. That year, a primary showdown between the conservative supporters of Ohio Senator Robert Taft (his nickname was literally “Mr. Republican”) and the more reform-oriented supporters of General Dwight D. Eisenhower reflected tensions within the GOP over whether to resist the principles behind the new administrative state or to adopt them in a more measured way. Eisenhower’s brand of “modern Republicanism” won out (for a while), and the Republicans retook the White House after losing five straight presidential elections.

But threats to the existence of the Republican Party have not been limited to ideological splintering within the GOP. When, in 1974, Richard Nixon became the first president to resign from office—and his replacement, Gerald R. Ford, pardoned him over his involvement in the Watergate scandal and cover-up—it did severe damage to the party’s brand. After the disastrous 1974 midterm elections, Republican efforts to revive their image were pleading in tone: They launched a prominent public relations campaign centered around the slogan “Republicans are people, too.” Though Ford went down to defeat in 1976 (losing to Jimmy Carter by a pretty narrow margin), the party successfully came back in 1980, with a new (sort of) presidential candidate, a new electoral coalition (adding evangelical Christians and white working-class ex-Democrats), and the same name and basic organization.

Most recently, deep fissures have been evident in the Republican Party between establishment and insurgent types. This began with the 2010 midterms, when the party’s control over its own nominations slipped away in the Tea Party revolt by conservative voters. In retrospect, it seems reasonably clear that the nomination of candidates like the firebrand conservative Christine “I’m Not a Witch” O’Donnell over moderate Republican Mike “Experience and Electability” Castle signaled a loosening of party machinery that was later manifested in the primary loss of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in Virginia, the resignation of Speaker John Boehner (after several frustrating years with the recalcitrant insurgents whom these primaries brought to the House) and, of course, the 2016 presidential nomination of Donald Trump.

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In contrast to the Republicans, the Democrats’ founding purpose was always more about process than a specific ideological end. And like the Republicans, the Democrats have also experienced periods of purposeless wandering, long-term minority status and internal division. Indeed, the history of the Democratic Party has been, to some degree, a series of efforts to infuse the organization with an ideological identity while holding a diffuse coalition together.

In the 1890s, the party emerged from a struggle over economic policy with a populist agenda and presidential candidate—William Jennings Bryan, who would win the party’s presidential nomination for the first of three times in 1896. Decades later, FDR sought to make the Democrats a more cohesive party, going so far as to try to “purge” the party of anti-New Dealers in the 1938 midterms. FDR envisioned a party organized around its commitment to New Deal principles, but his efforts met with so much resistance that he basically gave up on remaking the party from the top down.

FDR was not the last to try to remake the party around a set of policy ideas. In 1948, Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey (then running for a U.S. Senate seat) and FDR’s own successor, Harry Truman, saw the possibility of bringing together moral principles and electoral gain by making the Democrats the party of civil rights. This didn’t go over well with everyone. Civil rights drove a wedge straight through the party’s North-South coalition. In 1948 and 1968, Southern Democratic factions splintered off, forming their own presidential tickets under South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond (who ran as a “Dixiecrat”) and Alabama Governor George Wallace, respectively.

Another identity crisis happened as the era of Ronald Reagan unfolded and a group of moderate Democrats organized under the banner of the Democratic Leadership Council to promote an approach to governing that was neither liberal nor conservative, but rather a “third way.” This movement culminated with the presidency of Bill Clinton, whose support for traditionally Republican stances like welfare reform led some on the left to question what the Democratic Party stood for at all.

At this moment, the Democrats do not appear to be experiencing anything on the level of the Republicans’ crisis. But the surprise success of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign suggests some pent-up demand for a more ideologically committed Democratic Party devoted to clearer principles of social provision, income equality and a noninterventionist foreign policy. These aren’t huge ideological leaps from the liberal identity of the current party, but pushing the party to define itself in terms of these basic principles is a shift away from its historical purpose: to create majority coalitions by cobbling groups together, and, in a long-dead version of Democratic ideology, to limit the power of the federal government.

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The stability political parties provide is an oft-unappreciated dimension of U.S. politics. Opposition to the party in power has been reliable and loyal, and our staggered elections mean that an electoral rebuke need only be two years away. Our parties have held together long-standing coalitions and ideologies, providing continuity with the past and allowing governing majorities to form in large, diverse country. The Republicans and Democrats have been good at telling us what to expect and with whom to expect to agree. These are crucial, if unsexy, aspects of a functioning democracy.

And until 2016, it seemed that the parties were succeeding in representing their supporters: Partisans in the electorate increasingly hold a range of positions consistent with “conservative” or “liberal” lines on issues, as they have come to be defined. The case for a major transformation by merging a party faction or two with a minor party movement and abandoning names, symbols and infrastructure from the past, was not clear.

What we’ve observed in 2016 changes all this. The process by which the Republican Party chooses its nominees has allowed the nomination—via a plurality of primary votes—of a candidate who has no history with the party, no traditional qualifications, and who engages in political rhetoric that pushes beyond the boundaries of even the most polarized partisan discourse. The GOP’s leaders have proved unable—or perhaps unwilling—to stop it.

In a less dramatic fashion, it is also possible that the Democratic Party has outlived its usefulness as an organization, or will in the not-so-distant future. Party divisions informed by economic class lines have not been the historical norm in the United States, which has long impeded the emergence of a serious leftist or workers’ party. Because our system’s current design can sustain only two major parties for any length of time, the formation of such a party would entail coalition-building and compromise—yet the nature of an ideologically-oriented party is that compromise would deflate the base of support and potentially render the entire exercise pointless.

Do either of the two parties need to be replaced? The recent departure of Dmocratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and the inability of the Republican National Committee to deal with Trump, might suggest some degree of institutional stagnation. Parties are very useful, but we might imagine that the two we have would be designed differently in order to address the problems of the 21st century, rather than the 19th.

For the Republicans, the trajectory of the presidential race remains uncertain. More and more Republicans denounce Trump, while the party’s top leadership (at the time of this writing) has maintained its tepid endorsement. Despite expectations, the Cleveland convention did not descend into violence or chaos, although one of the major speakers did pointedly refuse to endorse the presidential candidate. And even as chatter has grown about whether some Republicans will flee the party to vote Libertarian this November, that move is hardly ever thought of as more than a short-term measure: They hope to return to the GOP once Trump is gone.

Through this election season, the Republican Party in particular has demonstrated that, while it can’t control its nomination process, it has the institutional resources to prevent a full-blown existential crisis for the party at large.

The thing is, maybe sometimes a crisis is what the situation calls for.