The whole crazed circus being very much a phenomenon of the Here And Now, an election campaign is rarely concerned with history. The point of any election, after all, is to decide who gets to wield power next, and the past doesn't vote.
So when Ben Carson – a retired neurosurgeon who currently trails only Donald Trump in the race for the Republican presidential nomination – went on national television this weekend and said he would never support a Muslim President, many people took the comment as, at worst, a standalone gaffe.
"I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation," Dr. Carson said, as though such an outcome loomed perilously over the 2016 election. "I absolutely would not agree with that."
In the face of the ensuing media firestorm, Dr. Carson sought to expand on his comments.
"We have an American culture, and we have an American Constitution," he said during a campaign stop in Michigan, a state with perhaps the most vibrant Muslim community in the country. "And anybody who's going to occupy our White House should be living in a pattern that is consistent with our Constitution and with our culture."
In a Republican primary full of deeply dubious claims about everything from abortion rights to climate change, Dr. Carson's comments are easy to catalogue as just one more – a knowing wink to the far fringes of the Republican Party, wherein reside the same people who cheer Mr. Trump's characterization of Mexican immigrants as a horde of murderers and rapists.
Not only does Dr. Carson have little to fear from alienating that rare demographic of Republican-leaning Muslim voters, he seems to have done his campaign coffers a favour. In the 24 hours following his initial comments, he claims he raised another million dollars.
And in a campaign where more than a dozen candidates have hardly ever uttered the word "Islamic" without sandwiching it between "Radical" and "Terrorism," Dr. Carson is walking on well-trodden ground.
Mr. Trump, the current Republican front-runner, who last week answered a question about the nature of God by congratulating himself on buying a particularly nice golf course, has also recently confronted issues of the Great Muslim Menace. At a rally last week, he did nothing to challenge or disagree with an audience member who prefaced his question by saying, "We have a problem in this country. It's called Muslims."
Among those Muslims, the man continued, is President Barack Obama.
"We have training camps growing where they want to kill us," the man said. "That's my question: When can we get rid of them?"
(In an answer that works equally well in response to any campaign-season question, Mr. Trump replied, "We're going to be looking at a lot of different things.")
But even if the candidates and their supporters spare little time to consider it, the echoes of history ring loudly in their comments. The current climate being what it is, Muslims might make for an especially alluring political piñata, but in the course of modern American history, many others have occupied the same unfortunate space.
It wasn't that long ago that comments similar to Dr. Carson's were made about a man who now ranks among the most admired presidents ever: No shortage of anti-Catholic activists howled when John F. Kennedy sought the presidency in 1960, issuing apocalyptic warnings that the Democratic nominee's supreme allegiance would not be to his country, but to the Pope. The only Catholic to run for president on a major ticket prior to Mr. Kennedy, former New York governor Alfred Smith, had his campaign thoroughly ruined by similar fearmongering.
And even those two instances, in the grand scheme of things, rank among the tamer examples of moments when someone, by virtue of their religion, ethnicity, race or sexual orientation, was deemed to be not quite American enough.
In time, but unfailingly, history has rendered the same unkind judgment on those who did the yelling.
And yet, the leading Republican candidates have joined the chorus – perhaps hoping to garner the support of the 30 per cent of Republicans who, in a recent poll, said Islam should not even be legal in the United States.
Here lies the Republican Party's most intractable problem. Heading into this year, the GOP seemed ready to make a strong run for the White House, riding a wave of midterm election results that showed the Democratic Party may be increasingly vulnerable. All that remained was to pick a well-known establishment candidate – perhaps a Jeb Bush or a Scott Walker – who could present themselves as a centrist (by GOP standards) and hopefully secure enough purple states to win the presidency.
None of that has happened. Mr. Bush trails badly in the polls; Mr. Walker has dropped out, his furiously anti-union rhetoric seeming downright quaint compared to some of the positions espoused by other candidates. Whatever moderate majority might have supported these men either has not bothered to make its voice heard, has been shouted down by an extremist fringe, or simply doesn't exist.
Instead, the party finds itself with two leading candidates who have a combined zero days of governing experience, and a cadre of hopefuls increasingly desperate to appease a voting bloc that dreams of a walled America, free of those who don't conform to "our culture."
The GOP's most moderate candidates, it seems, lack all polling support, while its front-runners are full of passionate intensity.
One way or another, the GOP's dissociation problem will come to a head next year. At some point, one of the candidates in the running for the Republican nomination will have to leave the echoing cocoon of the primary race and try to appeal to the entirety of the country. At that point, the GOP's senior brass will have to pray that the electorate has amnesia severe enough to forget much of what that candidate had to say in order to get this far.
The party's only other hope, it seems, is that enough American voters really do agree with Dr. Carson's statements about Muslims, or Mr. Trump's statements about immigrants.
In other words, the GOP must bet that the U.S. is in a particularly deep trough of an electoral cycle that alternates between hope that turns out to be misplaced and fear that turns out to be unfounded.