The First Party System in the United States lasted from 1792 to 1816, a span of 24 years. During these years, politics was dominated by the Federalist Party (led by Alexander Hamilton and John Adams) and the Republican Party (led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison). Many of the issues of the day were technocratic and economic in nature: executive vs. legislative power, centralization of banking, the power of the federal government vs. state governments. Foreign policy turned on the issue of whether to align with the interests of Britain (the Federalists) or France (the Republicans). The Federalists, based in New England, New York and New Jersey, represented the interests of bankers and manufacturers; the Republicans, based mostly in the South, represented the interests of large landowners and independent farmers.

To call one of these parties “liberal” and the other “conservative” would be without any basis in fact. U.S. politics didn’t turn on that axis until the very end of the 1800s. The First Party system was a contest between one group of property owners and another group of property owners; for most of this period of history, non–property owners had no right to vote. However, one theme we do see, which arises again and again under every party system, is the South’s hostility toward any governing power outside itself and any threat to its preferred economic system of large-scale agriculture and resource extraction, dependent on a strictly controlled workforce with little education and few or no liberties.

The First Party system ended with the demise of the Federalist Party, which had become weaker and more geographically isolated until it gave up the ghost around 1816. The presidency of James Monroe, from 1817 to 1825, was known as the Era of Good Feelings, the only period in U.S. history after the presidency of George Washington which didn’t revolve around partisan rivalry.

The Second Party System lasted from 1828 to 1854, a span of 26 years. It arose when the Republican Party split into two factions, the Democratic Party (led by Andrew Jackson) and the Whig Party (led by Henry Clay). Once again, the interests of New England and the interests of the South were pitted against each other, with the Mid-Atlantic and Appalachian states siding with the New England Whigs and the rest of the new “Western” states (from Michigan to Louisiana) siding with the Southern Democrats.

In this period, we see the influence on national politics of the opening up of an expanse of land available for settlement (subject to the removal of its prior inhabitants). Southern Democrats, of course, favored aggressive westward expansion of slavery, with the accompanying hostilities against Native Americans, and found it advantageous to call for popular majority rule in these new states. The Whigs favored maintaining the existing balance of power, which among other things protected minority rights against majority hostility, and extending it consistently as the nation expanded. Despite this, most immigrants to Northern cities reacted against Whig elites by supporting the Democratic Party. The Jacksonian Democrats were exuberantly corrupt, taking full advantage of the “spoils system” to reward their supporters with government jobs; the Whigs preferred a politically independent civil service, but the tide of immigrants in Northern cities led to Democratic control at the municipal level and the rise of urban political machines.

Other issues of the day related to currency (Whigs favored introducing paper money, Democrats sticking with coinage only), public education (Whigs were for it, Democrats against it), capital punishment (Whigs were against it, Democrats for it) and chartering of public corporations (Whigs were for it, Democrats against it).

And then there was slavery. The Whigs were against it, but what ultimately doomed them is that they couldn’t decide how strongly they were against it—whether they ought to merely oppose its expansion or attempt to abolish it outright. Moreover, the more common-sense Whig policies were so common-sense that many Democrats had come to adopt them, and the intermixing of ideologies eventually led to a situation in which the parties ceased to distinguish themselves from each other clearly on non-slavery-related issues.

Thus, the Third Party System, which lasted from 1854 until 1896, a span of 42 years, revolved primarily around the issues of slavery and Reconstruction. There was no longer any middle ground: the Democrats were hell-bent on extending slavery as far as they could reach, while the newborn Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln was staunchly abolitionist. After the Civil War, the Reconstruction regime in the South was Republican, giving political power to African-Americans for the first time in U.S. history; Southern Democrats fought Reconstruction with outright terrorism, and as soon as the federal government ended its military occupation of the former Confederacy in 1877, the Democrats presided over the eradication of Reconstruction and Republican influence.

Secondarily, the parties returned to economic issues, mainly tariffs and government spending, which Republicans favored and Democrats opposed. Meanwhile, immigrants filed into the two parties based largely on whether they happened to be Catholics (Democratic) or Protestants (Republican), kicking off a period of petty culture wars, while corruption in both parties intensified.

The Fourth Party System lasted from 1896 to 1932, a span of 36 years, and was inaugurated by two forces that could no longer be contained: a progressive movement for political, institutional and moral reform; and a populist movement against corporate power. The catalyst for both was the depression of 1893, at that time the worst in U.S. history. This was the beginning of the alignment of the Democratic and Republican parties along a labor/business axis, with the labor movement arising among urban Democrats in the North. Southern and Western Democrats weren’t pro-labor, but they were pro-silver—that is, they favored pegging the dollar to a silver standard rather than a gold standard, since struggling farmers were more likely to have their money in silver rather than gold coinage and therefore could enjoy greater economic security if the government recognized it as having intrinsic value. It seems unbelievable today, but the gold/silver issue was such an emotional one that it nearly propelled the “Great Commoner” William Jennings Bryan to the presidency.

Although it was a period of nearly uncontested Republican dominance at the federal level, the pressures of progressive reformers on issues such as democratic election of senators, women’s suffrage, corporate monopoly, child labor and urban poverty were intense enough that they might have resulted in history-altering upheaval if not for the unforeseeable rise of Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency. A Republican sympathetic to progressive social reform, he almost singlehandedly made it possible for many of these reforms to be enacted without handing the federal government over to the Democrats. Even so, he left the presidency with the job still unfinished and was succeeded by William Howard Taft, who reverted to the ways of his Republican predecessors. The result was a spectacularly chaotic presidential election in 1912, with the Republican Taft and the Democratic Woodrow Wilson joined by Roosevelt, returning under the auspices of the Progressive Party to challenge Taft, and by the United States’ most successful Socialist candidate ever, Eugene Debs. (James Chace’s 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs—the Election That Changed the Country is an absorbing account of this election.) Spoiler alert: Wilson won, progressives achieved much (though not all) of what they’d set out to accomplish, and the pressure of social unrest subsided . . . until the Great Depression happened.

The Fifth Party System lasted from 1932 to 1964, a span of 32 years, and was the first U.S. political era that we might call “modern.” It was a time of overwhelming Democratic dominance, a monumental backlash against the Republican-dominated Fourth Party System, thanks to the New Deal agenda of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For the first time in U.S. history, owing to the depth of the crisis, North and South were on the same page, at least for a little while; the Republican Party was reduced to strongholds in the Great Plains and upper New England, with occasional electoral successes in the Great Lakes states. The popularity of Roosevelt and the New Deal swung the balance of political power strongly toward labor and a federal government that actively promoted the general welfare of the public. This is the first point at which the Democratic Party can be plausibly referred to as “liberal” and the Republican Party as “conservative,” although neither party was as purely liberal or purely conservative as today’s definitions might imply. It was the era of both the “Dixiecrat” and the “Rockefeller Republican”; a voter’s positions on social issues were more likely to be defined by region than by party.

Before World War II, the Depression and FDR’s proposed solutions were the central issue of the day; after World War II, with that question firmly settled, the central issue was the containment of communism. This combination of factors—admiration for FDR’s successes in relieving the miseries of the Depression and leading the national cooperative effort to win World War II with alarm at the rising power of the Soviet Union—led to a curious situation in which New Deal economic liberalism went nearly unquestioned, even among Republicans, yet it became nearly impossible to advance such policies any further.

Meanwhile, a new force arose to upset the balance: African-Americans, fed up with the the injustice and cruelty of Jim Crow, arose to demand equal social, economic and political rights. The new liberal ideology of FDR’s Democratic Party demanded that African-Americans be given their due, and Lyndon Johnson gave it to them. But in doing so, he cleaved the intransigent white South apart from the Democratic coalition.

Which brings us to the Sixth Party System, under which we associate the Democratic Party with “liberal” positions on social and economic rights and foreign policy and the Republican Party with “conservative” positions on these same issues. Religion remains an issue, no longer on a Catholic/Protestant axis but on evangelical/mainline, pious/secular and, more recently, Christian/Muslim axes. Discrimination in civil rights and employment has been a defining issue not only for African-Americans and women but for sexual minorities and the disabled. The power of corporations has resurged as the power of labor has ebbed; the business elite now favors “free trade” over tariffs.

Meanwhile, the consensus behind FDR’s liberal economic agenda has fractured. Southern elites were on board with it as long as African-Americans were excluded from it; as the benefits were extended to blacks, Southern support for the New Deal broke down. Also, the South was never friendly to organized labor. As their alienation from the Democratic Party—to which they’d been unflinchingly loyal for 136 years—drove them into the arms of the Republicans, they found common cause in the dismantling of worker protections.

The Sixth Party System has tended to parallel the Fourth Party System in the way it’s combined social liberalism with economic conservatism. Republican plutocratic ideology has dominated the political consensus, even during the Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—a source of tension in the Democratic Party.

Still, one thing that’s carried over into the Sixth Party System from the Fifth Party System is the liberal consensus on human rights. Or rather, we’ve assumed that it had carried over. But recent evidence suggests otherwise.

Even in the Democratic Party, support for the right to peaceful protest, the right to privacy, the right to ballot access, the right to organize a union, the right to a living wage, the right to education aimed at the full development of the human personality, and the right to effective judicial remedies is disturbingly shaky. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has gravitated toward a consensus that rejects equal rights to life, liberty and security; that embraces cruel and degrading punishments and torture; that disdains freedom of thought, conscience and religion; that opposes Social Security; and that holds the arts and sciences in contempt.

But even that doesn’t outrage the conscience of humanity to the extent that the presidential campaign of Donald Trump does. He has called for excluding Muslims from traveling to the United States; has implied that he supports requiring Muslims to carry special IDs; has proposed rounding up and deporting 11 million suspected undocumented immigrants, predominantly Latino; has condoned acts of mob violence against peaceful protesters; and has perpetuated falsehoods about racial propensities toward violence taken from neo-Nazi sources. For the first time in decades, we have a presidential candidate openly running on a platform of unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, religion and opinion.

What does this mean for party politics in the United States?

Some Republican commentators have wrung their hands with worry, and some Democratic commentators have cackled with glee, that a Trump win would be catastrophic for the Republican Party. But as entrenched as Republicans are in Congress and in state legislatures and statehouses across the country, is Republican catastrophe even plausible?

Here’s what concerns me more.

Look at the lifespans of the first five party systems in the United States: 24, 26, 42, 36, 32. None of these systems lasted more than a generation or two.

The Sixth Party System has lasted for 51 years. The United States is due for a partisan realignment. Arguably overdue. And one of our major political parties has now rejected the principle of universal human rights. Straight-up rejected it.

And now it has a candidate who rejects it not just implicitly but overtly. And crowds cheer for him.

Suppose this makes a bunch of less radical (I won’t say “more moderate”) Republicans nervous. Where do they go? Where do they end up?

What if they end up in the Democratic Party?

Then we’ll have a Democratic Party whose commitment to human rights is even shakier than it already is now, and we’ll have no countervailing force in favor of them.

On top of that, we’ll still have a contingent of white “conservative” fanatics, based in regions where their views are mainstream and granted legitimacy by the Fox News Channel, dominating the rump of the Republican Party and not going anywhere anytime soon. And human rights will remain an issue that’s up for discussion, rather than a self-evident truth and moral pole star.

Truthfully, I don’t know what to do about this, but we have to do something. We have to lean on that rock and make it fall a different direction.

We have to make human rights incontestable, both inside and outside the Democratic Party.

Because I don’t think even making human rights THE ISSUE would be enough. As long as it’s up for debate, there’s a chance that we’ll lose that debate. And given the Democratic Party’s recent propensity toward snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, the probability that we’ll lose that debate worries me deeply.

Still . . . suppose we have no choice. Then we have no choice. Then we need to bend all our efforts to making sure that we have a clear, un-fudgeable majority of Americans on the side of freedom and equality, rights and dignity, reason and conscience and brotherhood. Starting now. If we have to debate it, then let’s start winning that debate.