This is how a political party dies:Trump, Sanders, and the collapse of our failed party elites [View all]

[restorefreedom]

This is how a political party dies: Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders — and the collapse of our failed political elites
PAUL ROSENBERG

The Iowa caucus results may have brought a brief reprise from full-scale panic mode among political elites, but there’s no denying that the terrain we’re on now looks nothing like what anyone expected a year ago.
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It’s not just the babbling punditocracy that’s been caught with its pants down this election cycle. As Nick Gass noted at Politico recently, Trump’s resilience has confused and confounded political scientists as well—in particular by challenging the thesis of the “seminal 2008 book ‘The Party Decides,'” as Gass calls it. The book’s thesis is fairly straightforward—that for the last several decades, at least, it’s party insiders, not voters, who determine parties’ presidential nominees. By those lights 2016 was always going to be a Bush-Clinton battle of the political dynasties, so it’s not just Trump, but Sanders as well who’s threatening those certainties.

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Thus, Obama’s attempt to deal with the accumulated backlog of unresolved issues, problems, tensions and unmet expectations in a bipartisan manner, within the imaginative framework of the dealigned era was successfully mis-portrayed as a radical departure, when, in reality, only a radical departure could possibly have dealt with all that accumulated backlog. (A radical departure, I should add, which would first and foremost consist of restoring how our politics has usually functioned.) This is precisely the argument that Bernie Sanders is advancing today.

If neither party is prepared for such a radical departure, then one or both of them very well may die, because the American people demand it, even as the established frameworks of American politics fail to deliver for them—both the frameworks of intra-party organization, which evolve over time, and the framework of periodic inter-party/transparty reorganization, which used to occur via realigning elections.

The unexpected storylines of the 2016 election cycle so far are but superficial expressions of far more fundamental untold stories deep within the bowels of our collective public life. Even if the GOP thwarts Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton’s almost unanimous support by the Democratic establishment keeps Sanders at bay, the profound elite failures of the post-1968 era cannot be wished away, including the chimera of elite bipartisan solutions. Sooner or later, something’s got to give. If neither party is equipped to respond to what the people demand, it would be foolish not to expect a return to the more chaotic politics of the pre-1860 era.

http://www.salon.com/2016/02/06/this_is_how_a_political_party_dies_donald_trump_bernie_sanders_and_the_collapse_of_our_failed_political_elites/