Every day, millions of Americans get out of bed, tune into the news, and ask themselves a simple question: How the hell did the Republican Party become so spectacularly unhinged? The GOP is fully off the rails, unbothered by any seeming concern for basic political economic stability, the empirical reality of things we can see with our own eyes, and the fundamentals of human decency. Donald Trump has remade the Republican Party in his image over the past decade, creating a kind of personalist strongman rule that’s without exact precedent in American history.

But Paul Heideman argues that the sorry, scary state of today’s Republican Party cannot be solely attributed to one strange, horrible man. Rather, it’s the product of a range of features of the US political system, some long-standing, others more recent. Heideman’s book Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos argues that the United States’ weak party system played a big role in creating the conditions for today’s derangement and the specific forms that derangement has taken.

For Jacobin Radio’s podcast The Dig, guest host and Jacobin editor Micah Uetricht sat down with Paul Heideman to discuss why business could destroy Joseph McCarthy but not Trump, the service-party model that turned both parties into fundraising networks, Newt Gingrich’s remaking of the House around money, big tobacco’s fingerprints on the Bill Clinton impeachment, the Tea Party revolt against the bailout, and why the coming fight to succeed Trump is unlikely to leave the party any less chaotic. You can listen to the episode here.