Republicans had a messed up coalition. They’ve always been lead by rich CEO and Judge Smails country club types, who were happy to flood the labor market with cheap workers and crush wages and break labor unions. But their rank and file members are mouthbreathing xenophobes in the post-civil rights era who were inevitably going to riot against those policies.
Then you have the Democrats, who once upon a time were actually liberals. Then they got taken over by the Clintons and corporatists, and turned into a tail party made up of well-off professionals who benefited from globalism at one end, and relatively poor and marginalized minorities at the other end, with no middle class in between. The Democrats no longer gave a **** about wages or socioeconomic equality–like the Republicans, the professional class were happy to flood the labor market with cheap labor, while the political class looked at these new migrants as potential new voters.
So you wound up with an unsustainable situation which both political parties enabled in order to make themselves richer, without concern for the long-term social consequences.
The Democrats are a joke at this point, because like Merkel and the neoliberals in Europe, they continue to advocate for open borders despite all of the obvious adverse social consequences that such policies have created, just so they can continue enriching themselves while adding minorities to their voter rolls. The minorities get promises that their civil rights will be protected, but the neoliberal economic policies pursued guarantee increased wealth inequality and lower standards of living for those same people.
Meanwhile the Republican party is fracturing apart. The Paul Ryan Republicans are devoid of any policy agenda whatsoever. They just want to run their businesses and make money and who gives a **** about anyone else in the world. The angry rural white voters who used to be their base are now on Team Trump and they would be happy to round up every dark skinned person in this country and put them in concentration camps.
Where are the adults in all of this?