Party rebellions in stereo

In a year in which the unprecedented takes precedence -- presidential tweets in the predawn hours, for example, or conflicts with longtime allies -- the merely rare gets scant attention. But something very unusual is happening in American politics, and it merits more consideration than the fleeting events of the day.

It is this: Both the Republicans and Democrats are being riven by rivalries, resentments and rancor, and this may be leading to a vital turning point in American civic life that has the potential of tearing apart both parties, upending the folkways of our politics and altering how the country is governed. This is not a calamity -- in fact, the result may end up enhancing our politics rather than ruining them -- but in the meantime the cries of crisis are being heard in stereo.

In this era of enmity, insurrections are flaring in both parties. The Republicans have a rebel president, a small establishment wing, a devoutly conservative camp and a wildly defiant faction. None speaks to any other group. The Democrats, though united against President Donald Trump, have traditional liberals and rowdy rebels, split over whether the party should lurch leftward to become more populist, rear rightward to become more populist, or abandon populism entirely and try to win centrist voters in next year's midterm congressional elections and in the 2020 presidential contest.

"There's no secret that there is mass disillusionment among the American people right now," Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who lost the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination but now is an important force in Washington, said in an interview. "People are unfavorably disposed to the Republican Party and to the Democratic Party. We have some of the lowest election turnout rates in the world. A lot of people are in economic peril, working two or three jobs, and scared to death about their futures and worried about retirement."

American parties have been split before -- the Democrats in 1968, for example, when the party's traditional elements, especially organized labor, lined up behind Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Meanwhile, violence spiked outside the Chicago Democratic National Convention hall, and partisans of Sens. Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy were alienated. But in that year, the Republicans were united behind former Vice President Richard Nixon, who won the election.

Then take the Republicans in 1992, when party regulars with George H.W. Bush repressed a rebellion undertaken by conservative outliers led by commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, who, on the opening night of the party's Houston convention, proclaimed a "cultural war." But that year the Democrats were united behind Gov. Bill Clinton, who won the election.

In each of those cases -- as in 1912 and 1916, when Democrat Woodrow Wilson faced a GOP beset by costly splits, and in 1924, when Republican Calvin Coolidge faced West Virginia lawyer John W. Davis, who won his nomination only after 16 days of bitter struggle -- a divided party faced a united party.

The most prominent recent exception came in 1980. That year, the Republicans were split between traditional conservatives such as George H.W. Bush, Sen. Robert Dole and Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. on the one hand and the assertive, supply-side conserva- tives who lined up behind former Gov. Ronald Reagan.

Ordinarily, parties with those kinds of schisms lose elections, especially since a rogue member of the GOP, Rep. John Anderson, broke from the party and ran an Independent campaign that won considerable positive press attention. But the Democrats were divided even more deeply, between President Jimmy Carter, who had a luckless first term, and Sen. Edward Kennedy, who ran against the incumbent president as a liberal crusader. Carter won the nomination, but lost the election.

Since then -- and that was nearly four decades ago -- there have not been significant divisions within both parties simultaneously.

The divisions of 2017 are of an entirely different nature, pitting party regulars, accustomed to compromise, against champions of uncompromise, many of whom value purity over practicality. The Jeremy Corbyn example in Great Britain suggests that purity has the capacity to attract enormous support at a time of political crisis.

Of course, purity also has its perils. "Since other liberals wrote virtually everything liberals read," the Stanford historian Richard White writes in "The Republic for Which It Stands," which will be published in August as the newest volume in the landmark Oxford History of the United States, "they lived in a kind of echo chamber in which they mistook their own voices for the sound of America." White was speaking of the liberals of the 1870s, but that insight could easily be applied to the liberals of 2017 -- and to the conservatives of 2017.

This summer, an important test in the GOP will come in Alabama, which has voted Republican in the most recent 14 presidential elec-

tions, with the exception of 1976, when a Southerner, Carter, headed the Democratic ticket. (In the last four elections, Alabama gave the GOP candidate more than 60 percent of the vote.)

There, Sen. Luther Strange, appointed to fill t he vacancy created when Jeff Sessions became attorney general, is facing a challenge from Rep. Mo Brooks, whose ratings from the Heritage Foundation and t he American Conservative Union are at 90 percent or above and whose argot includes prominent, derisive use of the phrase "Washington swamp critters."

The Democrats will have their own tests in midterm primaries and in the 2020 nomination fight. In recent weeks, Sanders has been holding tumultuous revivalstyle events.

"The current model and the current strategy of the Democratic Party is an absolute failure," he said at one of them, adding: "The Democratic Party must finally understand which side it is on."

Take that last sentence and insert the word "Republican," and you will have a sentence that GOP political figures are hearing, perhaps not at rallies but surely in their caucuses, which this year have become raucous.

But raucous caucuses are a sign of danger for any party, and when the cries of rebellion are heard in stereo, they are a sign of danger for the political status quo.

That feature of American politics itself is being challenged, special-election primary by specialelection primary, Capitol Hill vote by Capitol Hill vote, and day by day in this era of uncertainty and insurrection.