Why does it matter that Donald Trump is not a novelty?

In the past few weeks, as the campaign has intensified, I’ve gotten a lot of questions (and pushback) about why I keep arguing for the non-newness of Donald Trump, why I keep resurrecting the multiple precedents for his candidacy against those who would argue for its novelty and innovations.

Part of the reason, of course, is that it is an offense against history and memory to pretend that the GOP of the past was somehow a party of reasonable men, clear-headed and basically decent moderates who were taking the car out for a Sunday spin when it got suddenly hijacked by crazies and yahoos. For years, I’ve been making the claim that the GOP radicals and extremists of today are consistent with conservatives past; I don’t see why I should give it up just because it’s no longer convenient for winning elections, because it doesn’t jibe with the claim, heard every four years, that this is the most important election ever.

But as I’ve thought about it some more these past few days—why do I keep insisting on these precedents?—it occurred to me that there is a less historical, less intellectual and scholarly, reason for my claim.

In this election, we have the opportunity to repudiate not only Donald Trump but Trumpism, and not only Trumpism but the entire apparatus that gave us this man and this moment. That apparatus is the Republican Party and the modern conservative movement. The movement and the party that gave us the Southern Strategy, that made white supremacy the major dividing line between the two parties, that race-baited its way to the free market as the dominant ideology of our time, that made hysterical, revanchist militarism the common sense of bipartisanship, that helped turn the Democratic Party into the shell that it is today (with plenty of assistance of course from people like Bill Clinton), that gave us Donald Trump.

When we pretend that Donald Trump is an utter novelty on the American political scene, when Democratic presidents and Democratic presidential aspirants invoke the reverie of Ronald Reagan against the reality of Donald Trump, when liberal journalists say the contest this year is not between the Republicans and the Democrats but between a normal party and an abnormal formation (with the implication being that if only we could go back to the contests of 2008, 2000, 1992, 1980, 1972, all would be well), we not only commit an offense against history and memory; we not only betray a woeful ignorance of how we came to this pass (and thereby, as the cliche would have it, ensure that we will come to it again); we help shore up, we extend the half-life, of a party and a movement that should be thoroughly smashed and repudiated. (That, incidentally, is what all the great realignments do: they shatter the old regime, they destroy the ideological assumptions and repudiate the interests that have governed for decades, they send the dominant party and its leading emblems into exile.) We make plain our intention to give that party and that movement, even if they should lose in November, a second chance to make their malice and mischief all over again.