Four years ago Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann published It’s Even Worse Than it Looks. In a 2013 review, I quoted from that book:
“However awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive”
And went on to add:
Newt Gingrich bears a heavy burden of guilt, according to Mann and Ornstein, for the extreme polarization that exists today. In order to achieve a Republican majority he did all he could to delegitimize and denigrate Congress, and Washington, DC, so that voters would throw out the incumbents and elect Republicans to replace them. He was successful in creating that majority, but in the process he further undermined American's faith in their governing institutions.
Today, in“The political scientist who saw Trump's rise coming,” Vox’s Andrew Prokop interviews the American Enterprise Scholar Norm Ornstein about how we reached a place where Donald Trump could be the Republican presidential nominee.