Question for those of you who think trump will be last gop president ever

[pbrower2a]

If you believe in history largely as historical cycles, then this is a consummately dangerous time in America. Such cycles take roughly 80 years to complete, which coincides with the usual extinction of human memory. Lessons that one learned in early childhood include whether to trust institutions or not, whether adults in authority are are competent and trustworthy or not, whether technology is boon or bane, whether experimentation in 'lifestyles' is safe or unsafe --    and whether the Voyage to the Interior is a reasonable exercise, sheer futility or absurdity, demonstrable failure, or a dangerous heresy. Such lessons are subtle but profound. The children who learn such lessons do not forget those fundamentals so long as they live; such are the assumptions that underpin their attitudes and habits for a lifetime.

Go back eighty years and we are between the Hitlerite dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the Nazi invasion of Poland. Go back eighty years from 1939, and America is splintering on slavery with John Brown's raid (and in short order) such realities as Bleeding Kansas, the secession of South Carolina, and the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. In 1779, the British colonies from Maine to Georgia have themselves declared independence but have yet to secure it -- or a workable political order even after the departure of British colonial troops. Those prior times were Crisis Eras of American history.

All of those Crises follow or contain some economic panic, whether one around 1770, the Panic of 1857. the Crash of 1929, or the Crash of 2008. Smug certainty about anything other than conventions and basic laws of logic, mathematics, and physics is for fools. Seemingly anything is possible so long as it entails radical, fundamental change.

So far the discord has been political. The Republican Party has become an authoritarian and anti-democratic Party with demagoguery for the masses and cadre discipline for the  Party insiders. Potential directions include:

1. complete entrenchment of power, with the Republican Party rendering the Democratic Party impotent, irrelevant, or illegal. The United States becomes a single-Party system or a nominal two-Party system in which the shares of representation are predetermined with a 60-40 split, with the Democratic Party getting perhaps 40% of House and Senate seats and losing all Presidential elections. That is how things are done in the People's Republic of China. 

2. political failure that discredits it for a while as a potential majority Party. It might revive as an alternative for Democratic dissidents such as people who have no chance in challenging Democratic machines or people with special interests that the Democrats ignore at their peril. That is how the Republican Party went in the 1930s.

3. effective extinction as was the case for the Federalists and Whigs, with the surviving Democratic Party becoming an unwieldy "big tent" party. In such a case, the real political activity is in the primaries that decide who the sure Democratic winner will be in November of an election year.  The surviving Democratic Party in both cases rifted into two Parties soon afterward, one time becoming the Whigs and another the Republican 'Free Soil' Party.  Note that both the Federalists and Whigs vanished in comparatively quiet times in American history.  We are now in a much rowdier time in history in which rancorous polarization is the norm.

4. Business as usual? Such preserves the rancorous division and the inability of the Government to solve any problems. That itself is unstable.