The partisan political landscape today would never have been predicted a dozen years, or two dozen days, ago. And yet the current alignment, I would argue, is in line with the Republicans’ and Democrats‘ longstanding basic character as the oldest and third oldest political parties in the world.

As I argued in my 2019 book How America’s Political Parties Change (And How They Don’t), the Republican Party has always been centered on a core group that has been considered, by its members and by others, as typical Americans, but who are not by themselves a majority of an always diverse nation.