Before the conventions, the esteemed pollster Peter Hart boiled 2016 down to this: "The Republicans have a party problem, the Democrats have a candidate problem."
A few weeks later one can argue with this: the Democrats' success in Philadelphia bolstered Hillary Clinton, and it is surely true that Republicans have a Trump problem.The latest embarrassments -- inviting Russian espionage; encouraging Putin's aggressions; and demeaning the immigrant Muslim parents of a dead American soldier -- are mere symptoms of his appalling unfitness to lead us. But on a deeper level Hart is right about the GOP -- Trump is the expression, not the cause, of a fractiousness and incoherence too deep for one election to resolve.
True, the friction between the Clinton and Sanders forces in Philadelphia was more apparent than anything we saw in Cleveland -- if for no other reason than Republicans are better behaved than Democrats. But the Democrats' shared DNA is clear enough: diversity, social justice, tolerance, environmental stewardship, opportunity for all, and government as a means of ensuring that Americans don't fall through the cracks of a free-market economy. As a party they remain viable, and even vital.
Not true for the GOP.
The fissures within, divisive in themselves, hamstring their outreach to a broader electorate. On economics, the party is embracing a populist protectionism which offends its establishment and contravenes reality. And on racial and social issues, the GOP is fighting the tide of demographics, ever more dependent on a shrinking -- and very white -- slice of the electorate. Its principle hope of viability is to drive social wedges which galvanize the base, pushing away a growing share of the populace while widening the schisms in the country as a whole.
Trump invented none of this. He has simply turbocharged these forces by exploiting the divide between the official Republican Party -- donors, officeholders, business interests and free-market ideologues -- and a working-class base whose real problems it ignored.
How?
First, he intensified the racial scapegoating through which the party exploited blue-collar anguish without addressing its causes.
Second, he trashed the GOP's free-market nostrums by promising to turn back time -- launching trade wars; materializing jobs lost to globalization and automation years ago; and reviving industries, like coal, sidelined by new energy sources.
Third, he compensated for these apostasies by acquiescing to the desperate dead-end fundamentalism of the party's angry evangelicals.
And so the GOP faces an identity crisis. Its spineless establishment is hoping that Trump is a transient malady, like the flu -- or, if not, that they can find a place in his brave new party. But their problems, ultimately, are not about Trump, but about what the party chooses to be.
The starkest choice is whether the GOP will become the party of white identity, defying demographics while explicitly embracing racial animus.
For years, the party found ways of propitiating white Americans resentful of minorities and fearful of displacement. But Trump's heated rhetoric about immigration and Muslims, and his disdain for Black Lives Matter, made him the Republican nominee. And so the party faces a fateful reckoning.
It has been coming for a while. Mitt Romney won nearly 60 percent of the white vote, while widening the deficit with minority voters. Trump is turning this demographic crack into a chasm -- a startling 90 percent of his supporters are white. The ultimate question he poses, for the party and for the country, is whether the GOP can outrun the growing minority vote by increasing the number of whites driven by racial anger.
The Trump model is based on fear -- of terrorism, crime, and social and economic marginalization, all fueled by the sense among insecure whites that race in America is a zero-sum game. And so it looks backward, conjuring an American of the mind in which white men had their proper place, and everyone else knew theirs.
For non-white Americans, there is no mistaking what this means -- Republicans are their enemy. And Republicans of prescience know that this way lies oblivion.
All that [salvation] requires is for the party do what it has not done in years -- address real problems with actual solutions.
But much binds the GOP to the politics of race and paranoia. Its base of restive whites may be shrinking, but they respond to racial incentives. In contrast, by reaching out to minorities who view the GOP with understandable suspicion, the party may lose its most reliable voters. And so less honorable Republicans look not to expanding the party's appeal, but to passing laws which suppress minority voting.
The wrenching question is whether the party can exit its racial cul-de-sac. And what happens to the country if it does not.
The second decision Trump forces on the party is intimately related to the first: how to address the economic insecurity suffered by middle-class and blue-collar whites in an honest and sensible way.
Right now the choice is between false choices. Reinforced by tea party nihilists who have declared war on government and rational governance, the GOP establishment has preached an economic philosophy tilted toward its donor base -- tax cuts for the wealthy; free trade; de-regulation; and cutting back entitlement programs, which do nothing for its voting base. In stark contrast, Trump offers a meretricious compound of populism and protectionism which will never work in the world which actually exists.
But there is a third way: shunning tax cuts for the wealthy which only explode the deficit; extending tax relief to the middle class; protecting entitlement programs through measured reforms; recognizing the positive aspects of Obamacare for struggling families; and embracing re- education and job retraining to help those who have been displaced.
That way lies salvation -- from the poison of racial politics; the grip of selfish donors; the fallacy of Trumpian economics. All that this requires is for the party do what it has not done in years -- address real problems with actual solutions.
But to do this, the GOP must face down its donors. To be sure, in the era of Citizens United this problem is not exclusive to the GOP. But as our wealthiest citizens have departed economically from the rest of us, indulging themselves ever more ostentatiously, they have become ever more assertive about using the party to protect their narrow interests.
Americans notice -- and they don't like what this says about America. If there is anything salutary about Trump it is that, however briefly, he has separated the party from its donor class. This is the GOP's chance to reach a renewed appreciation of what America should be, and what the party should be -- and that is not the party of plutocracy.
But there is a third reckoning at hand -- whether the GOP will continue to embrace a theocratic social agenda which has been rejected by the country as a whole and which young people, in particular, see as narrow and outright nasty.
Here one need only look at Trump's running mate Mike Pence. This is a man of strikingly limited intellect and vision, encapsulated by his statement in 2001 that "despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill."
Trump raises a foundational question fateful to any party -- for all its protestations of piety, does the GOP have a soul?
But it does, and so does stupidity. As Pence exemplified when he decided that banning needle exchanges would curb drug use, provoking a wave of HIV in Indiana. But then Pence epitomizes faith-based ignorance -- hence his disbelief in evolution and global warming, the latter a denial so dangerous that it threatens our future.
Despite all this, the GOP establishment greeted him as a mainstream conservative choice, well-suited to become president should the need arise.
Really? In his last year in Congress, Pence was rated the third most right-wing Congressman out of 435 members. But while he ably represents what might be called the low-wattage wing of the party, the rigidly evangelical Pence personifies a more distinctive problem: the GOP's institutional opposition to gay rights and reproductive freedom, rooted in the theocratic notion that, the Constitution notwithstanding, America is a "Christian nation."
Start with abortion. As a congressman, he repeatedly tried to shut down the government over funding to Planned Parenthood. As a governor, he promoted a law banning women from aborting a fetus with disabilities which, in bizarre touch, also required that fetuses miscarried or stillborn be buried or cremated.
That the law was struck down as blatantly unconstitutional seemed to bother Pence not at all. Which may explain why he was losing for reelection when Trump threw him a lifeline.
But another reason was his vehement opposition to same-sex marriage and gay rights in general. Indeed, he is best known for pushing an Indiana law which made it easier for religious conservatives to deny service to gay couples -- for which he gave an excruciatingly incoherent explanation on national TV before being forced to back down by the forces of common sense.
It is these enthusiasms which commended Pence to Republican evangelicals. But the fact that Trump felt compelled to choose him illustrates the party's larger dilemma -- the evangelicals are loyal, and they are at odds with a changing society, another chink in the wall of the GOP's electoral Alamo.
It is striking, therefore, that the 2016 Republican platform makes all these problems worse.
On social issues, it opposes abortion in cases of rape or incest; bristles with hostility to gay-rights; advocates teaching the Bible in public schools; attacks transgender bathroom use; and bars women from serving in combat. All in all, it carries the sulfurous aroma of the Scopes monkey trial.
Beyond that, it adopts the worst of Trump -- protectionism; the wall; and anti-Muslim xenophobia. In every way -- morally, intellectually, demographically, and socially -- it makes the GOP a smaller party.
But Trump raises a foundational question fateful to any party -- for all its protestations of piety, does the GOP have a soul?
Do they stand for local control, or support Trump's authoritarian assertions that he alone is the solution to -- as but one example -- crime in America?
Do they stand for free trade or, as they did in Cleveland, protectionism?
Do they stand up for our allies or -- as Trump suggested about the Baltic states and the Ukraine -- are our allies on their own?
Do they believe that America still has moral stature or that, as Trump suggested about the crackdown in Turkey, "How are we going to lecture when people are shooting policeman in cold blood?"
Do they aspire to conservatism, or phony populism?
Do they retain any spirit of civility, or is the coarseness, hatred, ignorance, mendacity, bigotry, shrillness, vengefulness, demagoguery and hunger for power exemplified by Donald Trump now the essence of the Republican Party?
Do they care about the country above all else, or are they so obsessed with hating Hillary Clinton that they are willing to place our future in the hands of a uniquely unqualified, dishonest and demented nominee?
All these questions await them on the far side of 2016, and for years to come. Unless they can resolve them -- all of them -- honorably and well, fragmentation and extinction loom, a richly-deserved place in history's trash bin.
No one misses the Whigs.