Around Washington, in sundry upscale locales, in large quadrants of the internet, you still encounter lamentations about Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party and prophecies of the party’s approaching doom. Never Trumpers are less thick on the ground among ordinary voters, but they do have an echo in affluent Southern and Southwest suburbs that have switched from Republicans to anti-Trump Democrats. And they’re eager to tell you that nothing like this has ever happened before.

Well, not so fast. I’ve got a book coming out in October called How America’s Political Parties Change (And How They Don’t), on the history of our 185- and 167-year-old political parties, and I can report that things like this have happened before. One example of many: Franklin D. Roosevelt, undeniably a great president, especially as a war leader, but one whose policies also drove some prominent members of his own party to the opposition and some of whose actions seemed, well, eccentric.