If we want to understand why the republic is on the brink, we must start with the fundamental reality of American politics today: The struggle over whether or not the country should actually be a pluralistic democracy maps onto the conflict between the two major parties.

Democracy itself has become a partisan issue. As of right now, the Democratic Party is the country’s sole (small-d) democratic party – while the GOP is firmly in the hands of an ethno-nationalist movement and oligarchic interests determined to impose their reactionary vision.

How the hell did we get here? This is not a total history of the GOP and the American Right since the 1850s, of course – but an attempt to identify some key moments and dynamics and come up with something that may serve as a framework for how to think about that crucial question.

It’s the story of how a party with anti-slavery origins first became a “big tent,” then came to be dominated by Modern Conservatism, and has since gone the way of the conservative movement: Taken over by extremists who had always been part of the rightwing coalition, but never so powerful.

@tzimmer_history Last week, a colleague of mine said some of my students were going around talking about this really radical seventeenth-century left-wing thinker John Locke, and said they were reading him with me. I mean, we are just finishing the Two Treatises--basically the foundation for the US Constitution--and it reads, to them, like really out-there radical ideas, having grown up in the era of Trump and Netanyahu.