It’s tempting to characterize the ongoing turmoil among Republicans as a partisan “civil war”—tempting, but incorrect. A civil war is a contest between factions for control of a coherent territory. What’s happing to the GOP is closer a shattered window, where dozens of fissures run in all directions and, sometimes, back onto themselves. At the moment, the Republicans’ intramural politics are a kind of primordial swamp with all sorts of toxic elements oozing from the cracks caused by the party’s own internal contradictions. The insurgent candidacies of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, however, are not the cause of the Republicans’ long, slow ...
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