A breakdown of two historic parties

We are seeing two great parties being torn apart

Summer is upon us, with the promise of idle days spent lazing on the dock, drinking iced tea and watching two of the world’s great political parties commit suicide. The Republicans first. Next week’s convention in Cleveland is shaping up to be one of the greatest political disasters since the fall of Rome, and would be so if the delegates did nothing but confirm the U.S. presidential nomination of Donald Trump. There never was a candidate so unfit for high office: deficient in experience, character, ability or relevant knowledge of any kind; without serious policies on most issues and with wholly unserious ones on a few; his message a fusion of hostility to immigrants, fear of Muslims, and economic illiteracy, the whole salted with lies, insults, bombast and braggadocio.

At a time of rising social tension he appeals to racial prejudice and xenophobia, while taking an almost pornographic pleasure in violence. With the world order in disarray he promotes withdrawal and isolation one moment, militaristic fantasies the next, justifying the contradiction by the need to be “unpredictable.” If elected he promises to use the powers of office to take revenge on his enemies, to order U.S. military officers to break the law, to torture those suspected of terrorism and kill their families. Were the Democrats not about to nominate the only person in America whose unpopularity rivals his, the campaign would be over before it started; as it is we must count upon his spectacular failings as a candidate, in the absence of strategy, staff, endorsements or funds.

So the convention was already guaranteed to be a surreal experience. The names floated as convention speakers read like the guest list at a nine-year-old’s fantasy birthday party: Tom Brady, Bobby Knight, Mike Tyson, but not, say, the party’s former nominees. And hanging over it all is the prospect, still unlikely but by no means fanciful, of a rebellion on the convention floor.

By any ordinary reckoning, Trump’s nomination would be assured. But the quirks of the nomination process mean that, while he may be entitled, by virtue of his primary victories, to a majority of the delegate seats, the people elected to fill those seats may not always be committed to him personally: by a Wall Street Journal estimate, at most a third are. And while they would ordinarily be rulebound, depending on the state, to vote for him on the first ballot, the rules of the convention are ultimately what the convention decides they should be.

The votes of a quarter of the rules committee are sufficient to put a motion before the delegates to “unbind” themselves. If a majority votes to do so, Trump’s majority may yet be in doubt. At which point, take cover. The violence expected outside the convention hall, between pro- and anti-Trump demonstrators, may be matched inside, though at least the delegates won’t be carrying.

If Trump is the nominee, then, the Republicans seem likely to go down to shattering defeat, exceeding the Goldwater debacle. If he isn’t, the party could descend into civil war: no one knows how an enraged Trump, “cheated” of his victory, would react. Either way, it’s unclear what, if anything, could be pieced together from the wreckage.

Meanwhile, there is the British Labour Party, which this week embarked on a course toward its own almost certain ruin. Again, the issue is leadership, again fuelled by a populist insurgency that installed a leader, in Jeremy Corbyn, quite unlike any in the party’s history. In some ways Corbyn is Trump’s opposite: where Trump is untethered to any ideology, Corbyn is a fairly conventional relic of the British hard-left; while Trump revels in a certain chest-beating machismo, circa 1961, Corbyn exhibits no discernible vital signs. About all he shares with Trump is a comfort at being associated with anti-Semites, a fondness for enemies of western democracy — for Putin and Saddam, substitute Hamas and the IRA — and a manifest unelectability.

Elected without the support of most of the Labour caucus he leads — like Canadian parties, Labour now elects its leaders by a vote of the membership at large — it was only a matter of time before the caucus revolted, the Brexit referendum providing the needed pretext. Yet despite the resignation of twothirds of his shadow cabinet, coupled with a motion of no-confidence in caucus that passed by a margin of 172 to 40, Corbyn refuses to go. In one sense, you can see why: he seems almost certain to have his leadership confirmed by the membership in the vote just called. But if so, it may well result in the departure of 80 per cent of his caucus.

It is difficult to see what alternative they have. The humiliation of having to renounce their vote and serve under the very leader they had so publicly rejected must surely be too great. Even if they did, they would most likely still be facing extinction, whether by “deselection” in their constituency nomination races or defeat in the general election. Better, surely, to set up as a new party, alone or in combination with the Liberal Democrats, and leave Labour to the Corbynistas.

It is a fascinating spectacle. The two parties are among the world’s oldest. Both were until recently serious contenders for power. Both are now being torn apart. When a discredited party establishment squares off against a maddened mob, it takes only one reckless idiot to set the place ablaze.