The Party's over....but which Party?

Ross Douthat wrote an interesting piece recently that neatly sums up this most bizarre Presidential election campaign. His views are always worthy of attention because he's a right-of-centre columnist at the normally left-of-centre New York Times.

As Douthat puts it, Hillary Clinton is "the most disliked nominee of modern times -- except, of course, for her opponent".   It's an odd symbiosis:  Trump would lose in a landslide to any Democrat but Clinton, and Clinton would be trounced by any Republican but Trump.  Douthat actually finds that consoling; he worries that if Trump were to be trounced, the establishment would breathe a big sigh of relief and then ignore the populist pressures that gave rise to Trumpism in the first place. Conrad Black, of all people, makes a similar point here.  

As Douthat sees it, the fact that Clinton is such a lousy candidate makes it unlikely that Trump will be shellacked come November. "Because she can't put him away, we have to take him seriously -- and only by taking him seriously can we learn enough to make sure the next Trump isn't far stronger, and far worse".

Fair enough. But let's ponder Douthat's final sentence:  'Unless, of course, she loses".  Throughout the improbable Trump campaign, much of the media has had the entire Republican Party on death watch.  The assumption has been that Trump would go down in flames so spectacularly that the GOP would implode, with new parties forming around the Tea Party faction and what's left of the party's moderate wing.  Despite some high-profile defections, however, the party has in fact held together remarkably well in the face of the Trump malignancy.  Disaster on election day now seems most unlikely, so if Trump does in fact lose in a close contest, the GOP will probably dust itself down and immediately start preparing for the next round of midterms.

Maybe, then, it's the Democratic Party we should be worrying about,  given the no longer unimaginable possibility that Trump wins.  Consider: the economy is doing OK,  and the party has thrown its full weight behind a highly-experienced candidate who embodies the American political establishment.  And she's defeated by a preposterous, serially bankrupt reality TV show host with no prior political experience!  

How does the party come back from that, if it happens?  The soul-searching will be brutal, and there's every possibility that Democrats take a sharp turn to the left.  Despite all the crowds and enthusiasm whipped up by Bernie Sanders earlier in the year, that's almost certainly not going to wash with a majority of the American public.   

This election campaign has shown that everything you thought you knew about US politics is wrong.  It's unlikely that the rewriting of the rule book will end on election day, regardless of which undesirable winds up in the White House.