Many Republicans believe Donald Trump is the logical outcome of the party's failure to reform to confront its old, ugly demons. Credit:AP Goldwater's uncompromising conservatism might have been rejected by the American people but it inspired a generation of hardliners to join the movement, the most famous of whom was the actor Ronald Reagan who served as governor of California from 1967 to 1975 before winning the 1980 presidential election. Though Reagan became famous for soaring optimistic rhetoric, for the "shining city on the hill", that year his most famous campaign speech was in Neshoba County, Mississippi, a locale that had no relevance to his campaign but that was famous as the site of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. Reagan spoke there in support of states' rights. "States' rights" rhetoric was central to the Republican Party's so-called southern strategy. It allowed politicians to endorse policies that blocked African Americans from voting and appeal to white racial anxieties without transparently advocating for racism. Though its existence was long denied by GOP operatives, the famous Republican strategist Lee Atwater outlined it in brutal terms in a 1981 interview.

Questioner: "But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps? Atwater: "You start out in 1954 by saying, Nigger, nigger, nigger'. By 1968 you can't say "nigger" – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger". What does all this have to do with Trump? Well in the midst of the sprawling fiasco of the Trump campaign, the hysteria, ill-discipline, the backflipping and lying, the slander and paranoia, the one consistent theme has been of race. Trump introduced himself to American politics by declaring the first African-American president was a foreign agent, launched his campaign describing Mexicans as rapists and murderers and capitalised on fears of terrorism by announcing a ban on Muslim travel to the United States. When his campaign began to go (more obviously) off the rails before the convention in Cleveland, Trump ditched his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski​ and installed a more seasoned operator, Paul Manafort. And who is Paul Manafort? Well, in 1980 he ran Ronald Reagan's campaign in the south, he was the man that had Reagan speaking in racial semaphore in Mississippi.

Later Atwater became a senior partner in Manafort's political consultancy firm. In another twist, on Sunday night The New York Times revealed Ukraine anti-corruption investigators have discovered a ledger that suggests the ousted pro-Russian administration of Viktor Yanukovych, who Manafort worked for in 2010, directed to him payments of $US12.7 million. He has denied receiving any such payments. (At this point it is worth reminding yourself of the observation by The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne that one of the hardest things about observing Trump's campaign is staying shocked.) Though the GOP's Washington establishment has explicitly urged the party to broaden its base and reach out to racial minorities or face oblivion, its years enmeshed in racial politics has left it unable to do so, and morally weakened to the point that it could not resist a takeover by Donald Trump, a man who appears to have no political or ideological urge aside from the acquisition of power. After watching Trump's pitch to voters at the Cleveland convention the renowned American political scientist Norman Ornstein said the GOP was not a white supremacist movement, but that the supremacists who had once hidden in the movement's fringes were now in the centre of the tent. Avik Roy, a Republican who has worked for three of the party's presidential hopefuls – Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Marco Rubio – despaired in an interview with Vox that he believed the party to now be so wedded to white nationalism as to be beyond repair.

"I don't think the Republican Party and the conservative movement are capable of reforming themselves in an incremental and gradual way. There's going to be a disruption," he said. "The fact is, today, the Republican coalition has inherited the people who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – the Southern Democrats who are now Republicans," He is now one of many Republicans who believe the Trump phenomenon is not an aberration, but the logical outcome of the party's failure to reform to confront its old, ugly demons. The party has now lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections and it now looks set to lose another, this time against a historically vulnerable candidate in Clinton. Until it can reform itself America will remain, at the federal level at least, in the dangerous position in an increasingly uncertain world of having only one viable mainstream political party.

