Advertisement Continue reading the main storyThis strange endurance is a central fact of our present politics. We have an empty majority, a party that can rule but cannot govern. One possibility is that this is a temporary situation, a transitional moment — that the Republican majority seems uncanny because it is a walking corpse, that Americans vote for Republican politicians out of a Reagan-forged habit that just takes a long time to fully break. Like Trump, he enjoyed congressional majorities; like Trump (so far) he got nothing done, and his era’s empty majority was the last phase in the old Democratic coalition’s long decline. A big enough crisis under Trump would probably make the empty majority an ex-majority temporarily.

Source: New York Times July 29, 2017 18:30 UTC