Young people — hell, all people — are right to condemn the Republican Party, but it’s important to understand precisely why the train went off the tracks. The Tea Party is much to blame. In a representative democracy, being right is not a sufficient condition for being stubborn. Intransigence and purity — we’re seeing it on the left, too, now — make Congress dysfunctional, and a dysfunctional government legitimizes “How much worse can it get?” as a campaign subtext.

If we don’t perceive a swamp, no one runs on draining the swamp. Donald Trump does not get the GOP nomination in 2016 if Congress has a 50% approval rate.Underdog Truman ran against a do-nothing Congress, and underdog Trump did, too. The cause of the dysfunction is not money or lobbyists; interest groups make deals all the time. No, the cause of the dysfunction was doctrinal purity.

Doctrinal purity trumps (pardon the pun) character and competence. The Republicans have stood by Trump because they want their tax cuts and their judges more than they want a leader with character. These goals are tangible, whereas standard-setting, national prestige and world hegemony are speculative, egghead shit. Who cares about decency when there are bills to pay and a candidate promising to get them paid. Only elites have the luxury of caring about justice and character. People come to believe that it does not matter who is president, because nothing good happens under “good” presidents. W. was a man of character, and Obama was paragon. But things did not go well enough under either of them to make us care about quality in 2016.

That Trump narrowly won the election — a handful of votes in a few key states — is beside the point. The issue here is what happened to the Republican party, not what happened to the electorate as a whole. We’ve known since the Federalist that many voters are too busy or too simple to grasp political arguments, that the great challenge of a representative democracy is protecting the interests of the average Joe without actually letting him make policy. Disciplined political parties serve that purpose.

But party discipline has evaporated. The Republican party since the Civil Rights Act has been a coalition of conservative thinkers, plutocrats, and racists. In 2016, the conservative thinkers left the party, but the plutocrats and racists remained, and, more important, the party picked up white working-class voters. These people are not racists, but neither are they social justice warriors. (I’m sure there are SJWs who call such people “racists,” but polemics isn’t politics.)

I was fascinated to see Mr. Thrailkill put Justin Amash and Jim Jordan in the same sentence, as these two men epitomize what has happened. Amash may be wrong in his Tea-Party views (I believe the Tea Party is wrong about just about everything), but he is a decent human being who cares about his country. On the other hand, Jordan is an asshole. He wouldn’t know a fact (like that the college doc was molesting his wrestling team) if it bit him in the ass, and nothing he has ever said has served the interests of the country. That his constituents elect him says more about the incompetence of voters to protect what matters than any more elaborate study could possibly reveal.

How can a country that puts Jim Jordan front and center survive? Why is the party leadership not ashamed of him? Because the party leadership is Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalese, and Devin Nunes. Yikes. Certain places in the world are so inhospitable that the only people left there are the thugs who run the place and the people who are too stupid to leave. The GOP has become such a “place.” May it rest in peace.