After every presidential primary, we were treated to a new round of conventional wisdom about what things mean for both parties going forward. Yet, there’s every reason to be deeply skeptical of these discussions among people who never saw either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders coming. They represent a chattering class that both expected and normalized a “war of dynasties” between Bushes and the Clintons, then marveled at the “depth” of the Republican bench, and spent months obsessing over whether Joe Biden would run, as if he were a figure of mythic proportions.

You can laugh, if you want, but the out-of-touch nature of these treasured campaign narratives now lives on in a new form: an obsessive focus on this election cycle, when, if anything, the one thing it has to tell us is that much larger, long-range changes are afoot, and have been creeping up on us, below the radar, for quite some time. If you’re going to cover politics almost exclusively as a horse race, it makes perfect sense, of course. But that narrow-minded focus is an integral part of the very system that voters are furiously struggling to reject.

More than ever, we have to ask, why should the conventions or the elections be the framework for all we think? Even if Trump’s presidential run ends ruinously in November, Trumpism will remain, along with the GOP’s profound vulnerability to the forces Trump has unleashed. Similarly, even if Sanders fails to overtake Clinton’s delegate lead, his voters clearly represent the future of the Democratic Party, and Stan Greenberg, pollster for both Bill Clinton and Al Gore, seems justified in his warning last October that it’s a mistake for Democrats to run for Obama’s “third term.” “That’s not what the country wants. It’s not what the base of the Democratic Party wants. The Democratic Party is waiting for a president who will articulate the scale of the problems we face and challenge them to address it,” he said.

So party leaders on both sides—as well as bipartisan media figures—are simply whistling past the graveyard, perhaps with a slightly different tune just now, but still deeply devoted to reporting, analyzing and discussing things in a way that avoids as long as possible the profound changes that are clearly under way, and the equally profound changes that people are hungry for.

If past looming disasters we’ve ignored can teach us anything, it’s that this is exactly what we shouldn’t be doing. We need to be thinking as clearly and explicitly as we possibly can about the change process under way in our political system—including the objective realities driving it, as well as the deep socio-cultural and psychological forces at work, forces so deep that they are even reshaping how we think of terms like liberalism and conservatism.

At the satellite overview level, theoretical-biologist-turned-human-history-data-analyst Peter Turchin told Salon last November about long-term cycles of increased competition pushing civilizations to peaks of instability, followed by swings back toward greater cooperation. “When the elite are prosocial, when they’re cooperative, the society is governed well; and when the elite eventually become less prosocial, that’s when all kinds of troubles happen,” Turchin said. “In the United States, 50-year instability spikes occurred around 1870, 1920 and 1970, so another could be due around 2020,” he added.

Societies run on cooperation, but that means that the question of who counts as a member can be crucial, which helps explain the stakes in the very different politics of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Sanders’ call for a broadly cooperative turn is unambiguous—the more so as he’s expanded his platform to include a strong social justice platform in response to early Black Lives Matter protests. His support for immigration reform and respect for Islam—even Palestinian rights—are further reflections of his inclusive universalism.

But Trump’s cooperative argument is complicated by the central concern of conservatives down through the ages—the question of group privilege. This includes the full range of sub-questions: who calls the shots, who’s included in the social compact, how it’s policed and who is excluded, even demonized. While Trump may cross a lot of lines drawn by today’s tottering conservative elite establishment, he is undeniably focused on these underlying core conservative concerns, and as Corey Robin has pointed out, redefining what conservatism means at moments of high stress is a typically conservative move.

Thus, the question on the left is can Clintonian incrementalism possibly deliver the kind of sweeping reorientation that Turchin’s study of history sees coming, while the question on the right is what’s driving Trump’s redefinition of conservatism, and what chance is there for different sorts of resolution to the tensions fueling that redefinition. Whatever happens this election cycle can only raise these questions, not answer them.

We got an early taste of the forces behind Trump from political scientist Richard M. Skinner last September. He wrote a post at the Brookings Institute’s FixGov blog looking at five long-term factors contributing to Trump’s emergence, and I interviewed him for a story here exploring them at greater length. The factors were: authoritarianism, ethnocentrism, lack of ideology, distrust and negative partisanship. While there’s been some scattered mention of other factors, the most focused attention has been on the role of authoritarianism, epitomized by Amanda Taub’s superb article “The rise of American authoritarianism,” which places Trump’s emergence into an historical context of long-term worldview evolution and partisan polarization (as described in the book “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics” by political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler), and combines that dynamic view with a detailed snapshot via a Morning Consult poll on the subject. As Taub described Hetherington and Weiler’s findings:

Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.

Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.

In their book, they describe authoritarianism as a worldview capable of organizing and orienting a variety of different issues:

By worldview, we mean a set of connected beliefs animated by some fundamental, underlying value orientation that is itself connected to a visceral sense of right and wrong. Politics cleaved by a worldview has the potential for fiery disagreements because considerations about the correct way to lead a good life lie in the balance. Specifically, we demonstrate that American public opinion is increasingly divided along a cleavage that things like parenting styles and “manliness” map onto. We will call that cleavage authoritarianism.

And in a 2009 discussion forum on their book, they described how its influence as a worldview spread across issue domains over time:

That evolution started with race and ‘law and order’ in the 1960s, continued with the emergence of feminism and differing approaches to the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, and hardened following the rise of gay rights, terrorism, and immigration as high-profile issues in the 1990s and 2000s.

In the end, Taub suggests, “the rise of authoritarianism as a force within American politics means we may now have a de facto three-party system: the Democrats, the GOP establishment, and the GOP authoritarians.” In her final paragraph, she writes:

For decades, the Republican Party has been winning over authoritarians by implicitly promising to stand firm against the tide of social change, and to be the party of force and power rather than the party of negotiation and compromise. But now it may be discovering that its strategy has worked too well — and threatens to tear the party apart.

I believe this is a real possibility, but I don’t believe it’s due to authoritarianism alone. The other factors Skinner pointed to are implicated as well. First, there’s a close relationship between authoritarianism and ethnocentrism, which has been observed statistically for decades. In my article discussing Skinner’s analysis, I wrote:

[E]thnocentric voters oppose spending on means-tested programs such as welfare and food stamps, which they (mistakenly) perceive as primarily benefiting minorities not like them [chart], while supporting spending on Social Security and Medicare, which are seen quite differently as benefiting a truly deserving white middle class [chart].

Trump appeals to such voters in ways that “true conservatives,” scheming to end Social Security and Medicare, obviously cannot, even as he is much more forceful than they are in castigating Muslims and immigrants.

Second, there’s a similar synergy with a long-term dynamic of declining trust, the subject of another book by Hetherington, “Why Trust Matters: Declining Political Trust and the Demise of American Liberalism.” As the publisher’s description explains:

As people lost faith in the federal government, the delivery system for most progressive policies, they supported progressive ideas much less….

Growing distrust feeds into a more threatening worldview, which in turn feeds into authoritarianism. They are distinct, but clearly related phenomena, and declining trust fits snugly into Turchin schema. “Cooperation is unraveling at several multiple levels,” he told Salon in November. “First of all there is much less willingness to cooperate between the rulers, and the ruled, you can see that expressed in the declining measures of the public trust, for government, and similar things.” Turchin also saw it reflected in higher levels of elite anti-social behavior, and here Trump has been pushing the envelope in both respects, turning distrust onto everyone standing in his way—Fox News, Pope Francis, whoever—even as he claims to be a unifier. But again, he’s only advancing a logic that’s been growing in force for decades.

Third, there’s the dynamic of negative partisanship—another phenomena reflecting increased elite competition in Turchin’s framework. Skinner cited Trump’s identification with birtherism, and his attacks on Obama as “other” as a key to establishing his Republican identity, regardless of his past affiliations and transgressions. “Today, the issues all the fall on the same divide, you see major cultural divisions in society fall along the same divide, race, religion, and so on,” Skinner told me. “And that seems to be accentuating the sense of the other party being not just mistaken, but really just alien.”

However, there’s another consideration influencing how negative partisanship works: the asymmetry between conservatives/Republicans and liberals/Democrats described by political scientists Matt Grossman and David Hopkins, which has other significant impacts on the race as well.. As Grossman explained, “[T]he Republican Party is based on an ideological movement, around conservatism, as a set of broad ideas and principles, and the Democratic Party is much more a coalition of social groups that have specific concerns, and usually have particular policy goals that they want to try to achieve.” Hence, pragmatic compromise is second nature to Democrats, while refusing to budge on principle is second nature to Republicans. This, in turn, fuels profound misunderstanding, as Ezra Klein put it:

Democrats tend to project their preference for policymaking onto the Republican Party — and then respond with anger and confusion when Republicans don’t seem interested in making a deal. Republicans tend to assume the Democratic Party is more ideological than it is, and so see various policy initiatives as part of an ideological effort to remake America along more socialistic lines.