Looked at in retrospect, 2008 turns out to have been a real hinge point, doesn’t it? If McCain had not allowed himself to be suckered into choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate and had trusted his instincts and taken someone with crossover appeal and won, we might have had a Republican Party that wouldn’t have been so susceptible to Donald Trump. (Mind you, I’m glad he lost, but it’s an interesting and somewhat poignant “what if.”)
In a two-party presidential system, as opposed to a parliamentary system, the presidential primary process is the time when the parties, by selecting a standard bearer from among several choices, tell voters: This is who we are; these are our ideals, this is what we stand for. As recently as 2012, Republicans were still telling the country that they hadn’t gone off the cliff’s edge—the party was increasingly dominated by extremists who couldn’t accept Barack Obama’s quite convincing 2008 victory, but its voters still nominated, in Mitt Romney, the most mainstream of their four major candidates. (That same year, Romney notched his then-record setting fourth win in the CPAC straw poll, if you want to recall a halcyon era when the annual conference of conservatives wasn’t a confab fascist fanatics.)
Then came Trump. Until then, the party, as extreme as it had become, still retained something of a super-ego, the brain’s critical and moralizing force that counters pure instinct. Open racism and calls for violence, for example, were still mostly verboten. But once Trump started talking about Mexican rapists and telling his crowds to “knock the crap out of” hecklers and suggesting that someone shoot Hillary Clinton, and the crowds responded the way they did, the super-ego was pulverized. It’s all id now.