Do you remember what happened when the Berlin Wall fell? Until that moment, nobody realized just how decadent Communism had become. It had tanks, guns and nukes, but nobody really believed in its ideology anymore; its officials and enforcers were mere careerists, who folded at the first shock.
It seems to me that you need to think about what happened to the GOP this election cycle the same way.
In this photo taken June 15, 2016, Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks in Hampton, Va. Clinton plans to portray Republican Donald Trump as an erratic and unfit steward of the nation’s economy, returning to Ohio to press the case that workers would bear the brunt of the business mogul’s policies. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) The Republican establishment was easily overthrown because it was already hollow at the core. Donald Trump’s taunts about “low-energy” Jeb Bush and “little Marco” Rubio worked because they contained a large element of truth.
But as Trump is finding out, the Democratic establishment is different.
As some political scientists are now acknowledging, America’s two major parties are not at all symmetric. The GOP is, or was until Trump arrived, a top-down hierarchical structure enforcing a strict, ideologically pure party line. The Democrats, by contrast, are a “coalition of social groups,” from teachers’ unions to Planned Parenthood, seeking specific benefits from government action.