Is there a useful precedent for this most unpredictable of election seasons? Some have pointed to 1976, when Republicans were split in two and had to settle their differences at the national convention that summer. Others point to the chaos and violence of 1968. But a more pertinent example may be the election of 1936. The country was lifting itself out of the Great Depression, helped by the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, but the climb back to prosperity was long and slow, and a mood of populist unrest began to steal across the land. “The followers of the demagogues mostly came from the old lower-middle classes, now in an unprecedented stage of frustration and fear, menaced by humiliation, dispossession and poverty,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in “The Politics of Upheaval,” published in 1960. “They came from provincial and traditionally nonpolitical groups in the population, jolted from apathy into near-hysteria by the shock of economic collapse.” Many also “came from the evangelical denominations; years of Bible reading and fundamentalist revivalism had accustomed them to millennial solutions.” Outsider candidates became the vehicles of an existential protest, “Old America in resentful revolt against both contemporary politics and contemporary economics.”  If it all sounds distant and strange — well, so does the election of 2016. The demagogic spirit of the “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin and the “minister of hate” Gerald L.K. Smith — together they would offer what Smith called “leadership with guts” — has been reborn in the candidacy of Donald Trump, just as the exhortations of the Louisiana boss and ­rabble-rouser Huey Long, who declared war on “the superrich” and proposed a “Share Our Wealth Society,” all but predicted Bernie Sanders’s attack on “the billionaire class.” Then as now, the sharpest division in our politics seemed the one pitting the guardians of the political order against those whom that order was holding back or keeping down. Coughlin’s “somebody must be blamed” and Long’s “every man a king” are enduring mes­sages in our democracy.  As citizens, not just voters, we demand to know: Why is this all happening now, and what does it mean? The questions are too big to answer at a time already dense with chatter — the instantaneous eruptions on social media, the daylong spectacle of cable news, the steady drone of talk radio. Worse, our diagnosticians themselves often sound like patients, shouting from the gurney as they’re being rushed into intensive care, or like bemused visitors from another planet. With books, there is the added complication of faulty timing. Election-year analyses always seem to arrive too late or too soon. They are useful nonetheless. The mistakes and misapprehensions — what the authors thought they knew — mirror the broader thinking of their moment. They may not tell us exactly where we are, but they remind us where we seemed to be not so long before. They help measure the distance we’ve traveled and illuminate the route we’ve been inching or barreling along.  F.H. Buckley, a professor at George Mason University School of Law, belongs to the other-planet school. His book THE WAY BACK: Restoring the Promise of America (Encounter Books, $27.99) radiates high pedagogical purpose. A conservative who subscribes to the flat-earth theory that the federal government’s “homeownership policies,” rather than the sharklike practices of subprime lenders, “were plausibly the proximate cause of the Great Recession,” Buckley nevertheless earnestly seeks to explain — and he unpacks tables, charts and graphs to prove it — that there really is such a thing as income inequality and that the Republican Party should be doing something about it. Even before voters began punishing establishment favorites in primaries and caucuses, the yawning gulf between the superrich and the rest of us might have seemed crushingly obvious, but not perhaps to many traditional conservatives. For them, declining “labor force participation” may seem something the poor do to themselves since they lack “good discipline, good character,” as Paul Ryan suggested in 2012 when he was running for vice president. Ryan’s own state, Wisconsin, has its share of dying jobless towns, but Ryan remains in thrall to an older idea of poverty as a disease of the “inner cities,” infested by “generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.”  Buckley, too, is befuddled by struggling Americans and their odd habits. Why, he wonders, do so many African-Americans sympathize with immigrants who are stealing low-wage jobs from “low-skilled natives,” and why do the leaders of organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. “tug at their forelock” and docilely support filibuster reform and other “overclass issues that have little to do with ­African-Americans as a group”? The answer to the first is that views on immigration don’t correlate only with job opportunities — as surveys showed in the early 1990s and as hard-­liners in Alabama recently found when they chased out “illegals” and then had to recruit “guest workers” from Africa, Haiti and Puerto Rico to cover the night shift at vacant poultry plants. Immigration has become as much a matter of cultural alienation as of economic insecurity. The citizens of “Old America,” which includes groups “beginning to see themselves as part of the old immigration rather than the new” (as Schlesinger wrote), feel increasingly “marginalized from mainstream social and political institutions” and “are likely to blame immigrants,” one study explained years ago. “Such voters are likely to support Ross Perot (or Patrick Buchanan).” And they were overwhelmingly white. Meanwhile, African-Americans tend to sympathize with new immigrants, fellow outsiders. So do Asian-Americans and Hispanics, as the Republican Party found in 2012. The old machine politics of group identity and group interests has given way to a new postmodern politics of “cultural affinity.” The answer to Buckley’s second question begins with the long history of Southern Democrats using the filibuster to attack civil rights legislation.  But it isn’t seemingly unreasonable blacks who most agitate Buckley. It’s the troublesome white proletariat. Buckley cites the “magisterial” data-mining of the French economist Thomas Piketty and agrees with him that America has become “a society of inherited privilege and frozen ­classes.” But his actual muse is Piketty’s libertarian doppelgänger, Charles Murray, whose book “Coming Apart” has become the “Tobacco Road” of the intellectual right, with its lurid picture of a giant white slum “where children are brain-damaged because the latest live-in boyfriend makes meth in the kitchen sink.” The grim kitchen tour isn’t necessary, Buckley assures us. “You can also tell American classes apart just by looking at them. . . . The blotchy, red face of the problem drinker, the stumbling disheveled gait of the substance abuser.” You can bet he’s “a member of the lower classes.”  If this class warfare waged from above sounds familiar, it’s because it is now the refrain of today’s angriest Americans. No, not the supporters of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They are simply shopping for new models, as impatient voters in our consumers’ republic tend to do when no incumbent is running. The rage is coming from elsewhere, from the conservative elite, who feel betrayed by a base that used to fall in line behind whomever the party chose for them at election time, but now is rising up in childish or addled rebellion. Not so long ago, indeed as recently as the George W. Bush years, conservatives wrote odes to the hinterland masses, salt-of-the-earth yeomen and yeowomen filling the Nascar stands between heaping plates at Applebee’s. The Great Recession ended that and introduced a new era of seething hostility. The rank and file have spurned party dogma, and the spurned dogmatists are fighting back. “The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles,” Kevin D. Williamson, National Review’s “roving correspondent,” recently wrote. “Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.” This is the voice of protest in 2016. Williamson has the raw emotion. Buckley’s got the regression analysis.  How different it all looked only a few years ago, in the aftershock of Mitt Romney’s defeat, when the Republican National Committee withdrew for a period of spiritual healing and emerged with the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” better known as the “autopsy report.” It recommended trying a little tenderness. If only Republicans crayoned their principles in soothing pastels, new converts — blacks, Latinos, millennials — might flock to the tabernacle and add their voices to the small-­government chorus. At the time the autopsy was greeted as strong medicine, at least by liberals, since it parroted what they’d been saying. But the hard-­liner Rush Limbaugh responded with disdainful mirth.  To read GOING RED: The Two Million Voters Who Will Elect the Next President — and How Conservatives Can Win Them (Crown Forum, $24), by Ed Morrissey, is to see why. Morrissey has swallowed the autopsy whole, repackaging its pablum in a “field guide” for Republicans hoping for better results in seven battleground states. The demographics may not look great in a diverse county like Prince William, Va. — with its 22 percent Latino, 22 percent African-American and 8.4 percent Asian population — but demography, Morrissey pleads, needn’t be fate. Still, what sounds at first like naïve hopefulness soon blurs into cynicism since the answer Morrissey gives, time and again, reduces to “messaging” and “tone”: What undid Romney in 2012 was in large part a misunderstanding. His unhelpful remarks on self-­deporting immigrants and the freeloading 47 percent beclouded the sunny sources of what his supporters saw as his universal appeal — his “compassion” and “thoughtfulness,” his gloriously solid “40-year marriage.” Had Romney told that story, he might be president today.  Morrissey, a blogger and a columnist for The Week, is even more exasperated that Trump and Ben Carson galloped ahead of the field by striking a “sharply negative tone toward immigrants.” But not to worry: Their “entire appeal came from their status as outsiders, not as authority figures within the party.” The use of the past tense, along with Morrissey’s faith in the Republican Party’s “authority figures,” says all too much. In fact, he knows better. Flirting with candor, he allows that anti-immigrant feeling really “does reflect” the sentiment of “a noninsignificant number of voters who are worried that appealing to Hispanic, African-American and young voters will require an abandonment of conservative principles.” Noninsignificant indeed. Ask Trump, who has ridden the issue all the way to the nomination with no detectable reference to principles of any kind, conservative or otherwise.  Why the fetish for message and tone? Perhaps because what George Will and others call our “conservative party” has little to attract voters not already grouped around the free-market campfire. Such policies as Republicans offer repeat the old slogans, even when those slogans contradict one another. On one page, Republican activists in Wisconsin tell Morrissey that anti-immigration fervor “is going to be huge” in the 2016 election. On the next, he reports that the Wisconsin dairy industry “would have to shutter its doors without immigrant labor” since no one else wants those jobs (take note, Professor Buckley). In Virginia, too, employers turn to immigrants because “longtime residents aren’t willing to do hard physical work.” Republicans can be either pro-or anti-immigrant, but not both at once, as Marco Rubio discovered.  Niceness, in any case, has nothing to do with it, as at least one Republican knows. “What was it Donald Trump said in his first debate?” the evangelist Franklin Graham mused at the beginning of the campaign. “ ‘We don’t have time for tone!’ ” The quotation is exact and came during one of Trump’s “Finnegans Wake” verbal flood tides, in this instance the one that ran, “When you have people that are cutting Christians’ heads off, when you have a world that the border and at so many ­places, that it is medieval times, we’ve never — it almost has to be as bad as it ever was in terms of the violence and the horror.”  Graham, the son of Billy Graham and the spiritual twin of Trump, is one of several politically minded activists discussed in THE END OF WHITE CHRISTIAN AMERICA (Simon & Schuster, $28), by Robert P. Jones, quite possibly the most illuminating text for this election year. Jones has located the heirs to Schlesinger’s “Old America,” slouching toward a new Bethlehem of despair even as they fight rear-guard battles against “the new realities of American demographics, culture and politics.” The chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and a digital columnist for The Atlantic, Jones has dug through mountains of surveys and polls. The result is what he frankly calls an “obituary” of the nation’s shrinking population of white Protestants. The data are eye-popping. In 1993, the year Bill Clinton took office, a healthy 51 percent of Americans “identified as white Protestants.” In 2014, “that percentage dropped to 32,” Jones reports. And the news keeps getting grimmer, as millennials stream for the church exit, turned off by intolerant “anti-gay teachings” thundered forth from evangelical pulpits. Those left behind stew in the acrid juices of “cultural loss” and pine for yesteryear. Even before Trump arose with his talk of renewed greatness, Tea Partyers were trafficking in nostalgia and selling it as “constitutional conservatism.” All the while, however, Jones was feeling the pulse of Tea Party ­grievances. Nearly three-quarters agreed “with the statement ‘Today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities,’ compared to just 45 percent of Americans overall,” he found. “More than half (55 percent) of Tea Partyers agree that the United States today is a Christian nation — compared to only 39 percent of Americans as a whole.”  Trump’s success with such voters caught many by surprise. How could this Manhattan libertine outperform Ted Cruz, the preacher’s son with a command of biblical verse and brimstone oratory — and in the South, of all places? Jones has the answer, in his chapters on church attitudes on desegregation in the 1950s and same-sex marriage half a century later. A manifesto like James Dobson’s “Marriage Under Fire,” published in 2004 and presaging later pleas for “religious liberty” — that is, church-sanctioned bigotry — echoes the hellfire screeds delivered by massive resisters, including clerics, after the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. The linking theme was ungodly carnal mixing. Race and sex were big themes in the 1970s too, when the Christian conservative movement was forming. Activists like Paul Weyrich got little traction until they changed the subject from abortion and school prayer to “the federal government’s crackdown on Christian schools that banned interracial dating,” Jones points out, drawing on the work of the religious historian Randall Balmer.  Trump may stumble through “two Corinthians,” but he has mastered the more important scripture of the evangelical right. His suggestion that the world’s most dangerous places include Oakland, Calif., and Ferguson, Mo., may not be the favored idiom of George Will’s “conservative party” in 2016, but Strom Thurmond would have agreed with every word back in 1964, the year he converted to the Republican Party, new home to ­anti-civil-rights politics, guided by its presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater.  But 2016 has also given us a populism of the left, in the stooped person and Brooklyn growl of Bernie Sanders. How has this elderly curiosity come so far — over 20 victories in an impressive checkerboard that stretches from New Hampshire to Colorado, with strongholds in Michigan and West Virginia? Robert W. McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and John Nichols, The Nation’s national affairs correspondent, have written a useful primer, PEOPLE GET READY: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy (Nation Books, $26.99). Tame by their normal standards — their previous books include “Dollarocracy” and “The Death and Life of American Journalism” — this new book is quite as “lucid and informed” as Noam Chomsky avows on its cover, with the authors smartly touring the long history of the Democratic left. Sanders’s piling up of chickens in every pot — down to ­tuition-free college paid for by taxing “Wall Street’s speculation” — recalls the “funny money” schemes of Long and others. But he is also the legatee of a tradition that began with Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, continued through Henry Wallace’s ill-starred third-party presidential quest in 1948 and was revived by Wallace’s admirer, the prairie populist George McGovern, in 1972 when he ran on a platform that included “a guaranteed job for all Americans” and “huge expansion of public spending projects.” This agenda became an embarrassment to Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s, when Bill Clinton and others at the Democratic Leadership Council steered the party toward the center in pursuit of Jones’s “white Christian” voters, past their demographic zenith, but just beginning to slide. Populism was kept alive by Clinton’s rival Jesse Jackson, who is curiously absent from “People Get Ready,” though Sanders campaigned for him twice. Hillary Clinton, too, sounds today less like a ’90s-style “Clinton Democrat” than like a follower of Jackson, especially when she vows to “break down the barriers that disproportionately affect African-Americans” and tells Black Lives Matter activists that victory will come only when “you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change the way systems operate.”  In common with other political books this season, “People Get Ready” reflects pre-election funk. “A profound and numbing pessimism” pervades campuses, the authors write. Such gloom is symptomatic of what they call in their subtitle a “citizenless democracy,” overseen by a “web of corporate-funded think tanks, policy networks, political action committees and media.” All this seems less true today, thanks to Sanders and Trump, who for all their many differences have combined to expose the most decrepit of American “infrastructures,” the Beltway “establishment.” At this point it’s worth remembering that the so-called guardians of the republic assess facts differently from many voters. “For Huey Long, for Father Coughlin and for the millions who were rallying to their banners, it was a season of fervent hopes and frenzied expectations,” Alan Brinkley wrote in “Voices of Protest,” published in 1982. And something similar is happening today.  Consider the giant millennial cohort, more than 80 million strong and 44 percent nonwhite, just about the same percentage of “likely voters” in the Iowa caucuses who said “they would use the word ‘socialist’ to describe themselves,” according to The Washington Post. In this they sounded less like new flower children than like the skipped-­generation offspring of the “lost generation,” set adrift during the Great Depression and hoboing through the blighted landscape of a ruined economy until at last Roosevelt threw them the lifeline of the National Youth Administration. Of the 35,000 young people employed by N.Y.A.-funded projects in 1935, half had not been educated beyond the eighth grade, as Robert Caro wrote in “The Path to Power,” the first volume of his epic cycle on Lyndon Johnson.  Things look very different now. The typical “lost” youth of today may have a degree in science or technology but also a mountain of college debt and a job as an Apple clerk, as Andy Stern (with Lee Kravitz) suggests in RAISING THE FLOOR: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream (PublicAffairs, $26.99), a well-r­esearched and surprisingly cheerful look at the American economy in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Despite “a shortage of jobs, a surplus of labor and a bigger and bigger gap between the rich and poor over the next 20 years,” the new generation has mixed its own bracing cocktail of racial and cultural “intersectional” politics (uniting assorted racial and gender groups), together with chamber of commerce go-getterism. “We’re entering a new era of work — project-based, independent, exciting, potentially risky and rich with opportunities,” says one of Stern’s many interviewees, the founder of something called the Freelancers Union.
The divisions on display in this election year are not unique in our history. This season’s books offer insights on how we got here.