As Donald Trump’s Republicans look askance as he launches what looks to some like another long-term war in the Middle East, and as the anti-Trump Democrats hold up Homeland Security funding in what looks to some like prioritizing illegal immigrants over U.S. citizens, one is tempted to ask, what’s going on with America’s political parties? 

Something close to self-harm, you might answer. And yet it is apparent that the U.S. parties, the oldest and third-oldest in the world, are not in as much trouble as many old parties abroad. In Britain, both Conservatives and Labour are trailing the pro-immigration restriction Reform Party in polls. 

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In France Emanuel Macron’s centrist allies struggle to form a majority in the National Assembly. In Germany, the Social Democrats are in third place and the Christian Democrats are hard-pressed by the upstart Alternative-fur-Deutschland. And so it goes.

One hundred years ago, in the disillusionment over the enormous death toll of World War I, parties labeled as liberal, favoring free trade, market capitalism, and some welfare state, largely disappeared. Britain’s Liberal Party, governing from 1906 to 1922, fell to third place in 1923, behind nationalist Conservatives and socialist Labour.

Weimar Germany saw rioting communists, assassinations of political moderates, Nazi street gangs, and militarist putsches, culminating in Hitler’s takeover in 1933. Anticlerical parties, founded to limit established churches, fell to Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922 and as Hitler’s Panzer troops........

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