The old Whig party had become much degenerated from its original purity and tone; and, at the first clang of the bugle of the pretentious disorganizer, the mass of its adherents broke the ranks for new banners. —Robert McKinley Ormsby, "A History Of The Whig Party," 1860.

CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE—The Republican Party was born of panic. It was a child of the regular economic panics that afflicted the American economy. It was a child of the blind panic produced by the general perception that the country was reeling toward destruction. It was a child of the panic afflicting the Whigs, who had been for decades the other party in a two-party system, but which disintegrated almost overnight in the aftermath of the presidential election of 1852, left in smithereens by the acceleration with which the country was hurtling toward disunion. The Republican Party was born of panic, and the Whig Party died of panic. And, somewhere in what admittedly must be a very boring corner of Valhalla, the old Whigs must be chortling at the panic now afflicting the Republican Party, which has fallen for the most pretentious disorganizer of them all. What goes around comes around, even if it takes 156 years to do so. Somebody pour old Zach Taylor another flagon of mead.

On Tuesday night, Donald J. Trump is odds-on to win at least seven of the 11 contested Republican presidential primaries. If he does so, he is better than odds-on to be the Republican presidential nominee. The facts are as stark as the slopes of Lookout Mountain in the early morning light. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished, especially by those of us who see the Republicans as having been cruising for this particular bruising ever since it so greedily ate the monkeybrains in the 1980s. But, from the people who make their living at being Republicans, we are seeing the kind of existential panic that you only see once or twice in a century. It's Watership Down, with Super PACs and Mitch McConnell.

Almost daily now, we are seeing increasingly fantastical notions being floated by practically everyone with an increasingly meaningless title. McConnell lets it be known that the party's congressional candidates will drop He, Trump "like a hot rock" in the fall. Someone else is counting on a "brokered convention," or even changing the rules to free up the delegates won through the entire process, as though that would be anything but a sprawling knife-fight to which the most peaceable solution would be the creation of third, fourth, and fifth-party candidacies. Still other people speak dreamily of saviors—Paul Ryan, who would preside over the convention, or even Willard Romney, who keeps sniping at He, Trump on Twitter while He, Trump snaps back (correctly) that Romney is a two-time loser whom nobody really likes.

Make no mistake: All of these scenarios are profoundly corrupt and profoundly anti-democratic. He, Trump played by the rules established by the largely vestigial Republican establishment. He won in caucus states (Nevada), and he won in primary states (South Carolina, New Hampshire). He stands poised to win states on Tuesday night from Massachusetts to Alabama. There has been no hint of scandal in any of his victories. It is delusional to pretend that he is not the overwhelming choice of the people who are voting Republican in the year of Our Lord 2016. And it is intellectually dishonest to try to concoct strategies to deny the consensus choice of your party a nomination fairly won just because the consensus choice of your party is a vulgar talking yam. If your party happens to have concocted a constituency with a sweet tooth for authoritarian nonsense, then trying (again) to push that reckoning down the road is to guarantee something even worse comes along next time.

(And, please, let us have no more handwringing from putative liberals like Peter Beinart, who thinks that it is a strategic move for liberals to vote for Young Marco Rubio in order to slow down He, Trump. First, Young Marco Rubio is a big bag of feathers whose economic plan is a pile of magic beans, and who has been programmed for the kind of neoconservative adventurism that Beinart once cheered in its Iraq iteration. And, second, if the current Republican Party is falling to smithereens, the only sensible and responsible move is for liberals to step back and watch it happen.)

As it happens, there's a more recent parallel than the Whigs to what's happening to the Republicans now. It happened to the Democrats in 1948, when the party splintered at its convention over civil rights, and Strom Thurmond and his segregationist bloc walked out, the first stirrings of the process that would lead to a Republican Party so attached to a white nationalist ideology that its voters have found it impossible to resist the blandishments of the right demagogue at the right time.

"We in the South," Thurmond told the convention, "are greatly disturbed and concerned over the threat to free and constitutional government in the United States…Our people have been divided at a time when national unity is vital to the peace in this troubled world…It is the fight of every American who does not want to be subjected to a federal police state…We do not wish to take from any American his constitutional rights, but we do not intend that our constitutional rights shall be sacrificed for the selfish and distorted purpose of gaining minority votes."

The Democratic Party let Thurmond and his delegates walk, and, after a brief attempt at being a separate political party, most of them and their successors found a home in a Republican Party. For a very long time, the Republican Party profited from this development as it slowly slipped into the entity we see today—a creaking machinery falling apart in the present because it never fully came to grips with its past. The odds are that, on Wednesday, there aren't going to be nearly enough roosts for all of the chickens that Donald Trump has called home.

Update (1:41 PM): This post has been updated to reflect that the Whigs were largely done in by the presidential election of 1852, although the party did not formally dissolve until 1854.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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