This year’s primaries seem to be providing little in the way of good news for both parties’ futures. Both parties’ primary electorates seem focused on fighting the same old battles they have been fighting since Donald Trump clinched the Republican Party presidential nomination 121 months ago. 

Republican primary voters have been obediently following the orders of a president who must leave office two and a half years from now. Democratic primary voters seem focused on endorsing whoever denounces him most vitriolically. 

Thus, 75% of Louisiana Republicans rejected Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) on May 16, 55% of Kentucky’s 4th District Republicans rejected Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) on May 19, and 64% of Texas runoff primary voters rejected Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) on June 2. In that last case, the votes went to Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was impeached (but not convicted by the Texas House) and whose wife of 38 years is suing him “on biblical grounds.”

Loyalty to a president whose idiosyncratic preoccupations — resurrecting tariffs, restricting Iran — are opposed by largely nonoverlapping segments of the Republican electorate sweeps all before it, for the moment. 

Democratic primary voters appear on the verge of endorsing candidates who most vibrantly radiate contempt for Trump, despite problematic signs in their own profiles. Democrats in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District nominated Adam Hamawy, an unrepentant witness for the “blind sheik” in his trial for trying to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, and who worked for an al Qaeda front in Bosnia in 1994. 

Democrats in Maine are in the process (through early voting) of giving their nomination on June 9 to “oysterman” Graham Platner for the Senate next Tuesday, despite his Nazi tattoo and his sexually explicit messaging. And, judging from the most recent polling, Democrats in Michigan may be on the verge of nominating Abdul El Sayed despite his support from anti-American influencer Hasan Piker and doubts about his claims to have worked as a physician. 

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America’s political parties are the oldest and third-oldest in the world: Democrats dating from 1832 and Republicans from 1854, and they have both had their troubles before — though rarely simultaneously. 

And they are not in as much trouble as some of Europe’s oldest political parties, with Britain’s Conservatives (who date from 1846), Germany’s Social Democrats (1875), and British Labour (1900) tumbling down to percentages in the low double digits in recent elections. Some of those parties have been overtaken in polls by recently created populist parties such as Britain’s Reform and Germany’s AfD.

Some have applauded those developments and cheered for the old parties’ downfalls. American liberals have tried jiggering electoral systems with a view to derailing Republicans, with ranked choice voting in Maine and Alaska (and New York City and Washington, D.C.), all-party primaries in Washington and California, and Democrats withdrawing in favor of theoretically independent candidates in Nebraska and Kansas. 

Critics have pointed to polls showing more respondents identifying as independents, even though in actual elections, historically low percentages of voters split their tickets. Rules encouraging mail-in voting and allowing ballot harvesting have raised legitimate suspicions about the legitimacy of counts. California allows votes postmarked on Election Day to be counted later, which is why officials there say they may take four or five weeks to determine who wins close races.

There is a temptation to write off our current parties as hopelessly addled by loyalty to, or hatred of, Trump. But history advises caution. You can argue, as I have, that both parties these days seem engaged in self-harm, and the only question is which one will hurt itself more by poor candidate choices and tactical blunders. But worse things can happen in electoral democracies, and have. 

A century ago, the horrors of what was then called the Great War were followed by an antidemocratic upheaval. Riots in St. Petersburg in 1918 removed a nascent representative government and produced a communist tyranny that spread over much of the earth and lasted more than 70 years. A comic opera march on Rome in 1922 imposed Fascism in Italy for 22 years. Street thuggery in Weimar-era Berlin led to Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship, a world war that killed millions, and the Holocaust.

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America’s political parties, old even then, did better. The Democratic Party, always a coalition of people considered not ordinary Americans but capable of notable majorities, collapsed in 1918-20 through Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy and economic misrule. But Republicans, with a core of people considered ordinary Americans but not yet a majority, were there to provide competent governance in the 1920s.

Similarly, when Republican support collapsed from 1930 to 1934 due to the Great Depression, the Democrats were capable of providing leadership capable of governing. But just as Democrats recovered from collapse in 1920 and won again, so Republicans recovered from collapse in 1932 and were capable of winning again, although that was hidden by Franklin Roosevelt’s success as leader of what was in fact a bipartisan war government.

The enduring character of America’s historical parties has provided and can provide again an alternative to antidemocratic or anti-republican alternatives that may emerge, as they did in Europe a century ago. In the meantime, there may be a premium for the party that emerges first from what some might call its version of Trump derangement syndrome.