Lessons for 2016 from the smashup of the Second Party System and the War of the Whig succession.

The rise of Donald Trump has caused many to predict that the Republican Party as we know it is on the verge of self-destruction. But such party realignments are nothing new. In the first in a series of articles on political realignments, Walter Dean Burnham writes that conflicts between the states over slavery and immigration led to the “War of the Whig succession” of the late 1850s and the rise of the Know Nothing Party. What followed was the destabilization of the 2nd Party System, and the creation of the Republican Party.