Two despised frontrunners, two dying parties and a deeply broken system: How did we get here?

To paraphrase a great American poet of the 1980s, this is not our beautiful house. We get a tiny breather in the political calendar this week, and it’s a useful moment to take half a step back from the most chaotic and disordered presidential campaign in living memory and ask ourselves the big question: What in the name of Jiminy Cricket is going on here? I spent the week digging into the past for clues to the strange dynamics of the present: To be clear, I did not conclude that Donald Tru