By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

The Republican establishment wrings its hands over the future of its Party while the Democratic establishment weeps crocodile tears, decrying the sorry state of America’s political culture. Neither is prepared to acknowledge that the Donald Trump phenomenon that they so loathe is the consequence of their own sins of commission and omission.

For over forty years the Republican Party has sustained its political viability by welcoming the support of racists, nativists, charlatans, plutocrats, hucksters, birthers, climate-change deniers, and religious hate mongers, while its establishment imagined itself to be superior to them.

The G.O.P. elected Richard Nixon and achieved electoral realignment across the former Confederacy by consciously pursuing the “Southern strategy” of mobilizing White racists disaffected by Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights agenda. Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman’s 2005 apology to the NAACP did not stop the strategy’s continuing use.

Ronald Reagan chose to begin his successful presidential campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where in 1964 White racists had murdered three civil rights workers. His campaign kickoff speech there praised “states’ rights.” His message and its intended audience were unmistakable.

But Republicans remained unable to capture Congress and many statehouses by force of reasoned argument, as had been practiced by such genuinely good and decent predecessors as Barry Goldwater and Everett Dirksen.

So Newt Gingrich devised a strategy of massive and coordinated attacks on Democrats’ personal character. In 1990 the GOP Action Committee instructed its network to memorize a list of “Optimistic Positive Governing Words” such as “common sense,” “freedom” and “principled” to describe Republicans, and a list of such “Contrasting Words” as “excuses,” “pathetic” and “stagnation” to disparage their opponents.

Every week, GOPAC mailed cassette tapes to over 400 Republican office holders and candidates. They contained new “Newtspeak” (their term) words to use and directions on how to use them.

The strategy was not only an essential element in Republicans’ gaining control of Congress in the 1994 election. It spawned an industry of talk radio demagogues and hate speech authors. And it helped elect George W. Bush, who may have been the dumbest President in the history of the office.

So when Trump relies on racists, zealots, and nativists to grow his base, he is firmly in the tradition of Nixon and Reagan. When he calls Mexican immigrants “rapists,” says that “Islam hates us,” personally insults his Republican opponents, and repeatedly incites violence, he is following a well traveled road, laid out by Newt Gingrich and paved by hate mongers like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Glenn Beck.

When he unapologetically presents fiction as fact, as in claiming that he saw thousands of New Jersey Muslims cheer the 9/11 attacks, he might as well be a Fox News host.

When he talks dumb, he’s firmly in the George W. Bush tradition of “the guy that I’d rather have a beer with.” But unlike W, he’s not dumb; he’s not owned by Republican oligarchs; he won’t stay on a short leash held by the likes of Dick Cheney. And that has his Party’s establishment running in circles.

But the Democratic establishment should find neither comfort nor a sense of superiority in that. They share responsibility for creating the Trump phenomenon, and they are ill prepared to deal with it.

The core of Donald Trump’s support comes from the White working class, who the Democratic establishment has, at best, treated condescendingly, and often betrayed. Many of them dropped out of the 2012 election, finding both Romney and Obama unappealing.

From the Republicans among their number is where Trump is drawing the “new voters” that he is pulling to Republican primaries, while Bernie Sanders is drawing the new Democrats, a sizable portion of whom say they will vote for Trump in the general election if they can’t vote for Bernie.

Their reasons begin with a history of policies initiated or advocated by Bill and Hillary Clinton. The North American Free Trade Agreement created a $97.2 billion trade deficit with Mexico, displaced 682,900 jobs, and worsened working conditions for many Americans.

Along the way, by delivering subsidized U.S. corn to Mexican markets, NAFTA put 2 million Mexican farmers out of work and put 20 million Mexicans into “food poverty,” swelling the ranks of illegal immigrants to the U.S.

The Clintons advocated for bank deregulation and repeal of the Glass Steagall Act, leading directly to the global financial crisis in which 2.6 million Americans lost their jobs in 2008 alone, and millions more eventually lost their homes.

The Clintons supported the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which was marketed as fixing a welfare system that all acknowledged was severely broken. It imposed time-limited, restrictive state grants, ensuring that millions would remain among the working poor for the rest of their lives. By the time the Clintons left the White House, most welfare recipients, 70% of whom were children, had been purged from the roles.

And then there was the fast expansion of the prison-industrial complex, absorbing funds that could be used for public purposes or deficit reduction to the tune of $40,000 or more per prisoner per year. The population of state and federal prisons increased by 673,000 during the Clinton administration.

Today we have a Democratic President who is pushing through another trade deal, initially negotiated by Mrs. Clinton, that will harm working Americans.

He may someday prove to have been wiser about foreign policy than most of us knew. But his observation that more Americans die from bathtub falls than from terrorism is a poor substitute for explaining his decisions to us in terms we can understand. And he seems to be missing the fact that, however safe we actually are, the ratio of our fear level to a real threat is probably the highest on earth.

Both the Republican and Democratic establishments are responsible for our economic and political institutions’ being broken beyond repair. And that is the real reason for the Trump phenomenon. It’s why this election season has been so unpredictable, and it won’t change, whoever is elected president.

It won’t change until we are moving toward institutional transformation that goes beyond that of the New Deal—or toward that which took place in fascist Italy and Germany. Historical moments like this produce authoritarian movements based on fear and a desire for a strong leader to protect us. And they produce socialist movements based on hope and a desire for greater democracy.

Political scientist Matthew MacWilliams has found that the trait that best predicts a Trump supporter is his or her score on an authoritarianism index.

Which way America will go is worthy of considerable discussion. But that is another column.