But seizing that opportunity will take more than defeating Trump because the political pathologies that he represents -- such as a Republican base ready to support a proto-fascist candidate, and a political party that has worked for years to create such a base -- would not disappear.
The good news is that the Trump candidacy also supplies the means to attack the systemic political disease that has arisen on the right.
A characteristic error Democrats make is to focus excessively on the presidential race. But what is needed is a coherent political strategy to address this systemic problem at all these levels.
We need a strategy that works simultaneously to keep the White House out of the hands of Trump and the GOP, to wrest as much control as possible from the obstructionist Republicans, and to inflict maximal lasting damage to today's aberrant Republican Party.
Control of Congress is essential, because the Republicans will otherwise make it nearly impossible for any newly elected Democratic president to move the nation forward; the opportunity to damage the Republican "brand" is no less important, as the GOP has become more consistently destructive of the nation than any major political party in our history.
Not just piece by piece, but with an integrated strategy/ These goals are best pursued in a coordinated way.
History shows that it would be a mistake to assume that winning the presidency even by a landslide would take care of achieving the other two essential goals:
1) In 1972, the Republican incumbent, Richard Nixon, won all but one of the states against Democratic nominee George McGovern. Nonetheless, the Democrats fared well in the House and Senate races, and maintained control of both houses of Congress for years.
2) In 1964, the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, lost to Lyndon Johnson by more than 20 percentage points. But only four years later, the Republicans won the White House. They kept it for 20 of the next 24 years.
A coherent strategy would use Trump, with his exceptionally high unfavorables, to indelibly stain the Republican brand in the eyes of the American people.
What makes such a strategy feasible is this essential truth, substantiated by dozens of fine interpreters of the American political scene: The ugliness of Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency is not something apart from the GOP, not something that just happened inside the Republican Party. Rather, the rise of Trump is a flagrant manifestation of the heart of that party.
Although many have described the connection between what is ugly about Donald Trump and what the Republican Party, that connection is not fully grasped by the American electorate.
People are distracted, for example, by the competing narrative that recounts the continuing struggle between the Republican "Establishment" and Trump -- which is a valid but superficial story. One reason the establishment Republicans fear Trump is that he blows their cover, their pretense to being a normal and acceptable political party by traditional American standards. Their problem with Trump is not that he is a wolf but that -- unlike the Republican Party as a whole -- he does not bother to wear sheep's clothing.
And there's the opportunity. Trump makes it easy to show the ugly and destructive nature of the Republican Party in our times, as he presents in more blatant form the GOP's by now long-standing
" Indifference to truth
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