On the most pressing policy issues of the day, from health care and entitlements to religious liberty and national defense, the Republican leadership in Congress appears paralyzed.

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Political parties come and go. The Federalist Party, which dominated the American political scene during the first decade of the republic, was a spent force by 1816 and extinct by 1820. The Progressive Party has come and gone at least three times—first in 1912 with Teddy Roosevelt’s third party run for the presidency; then in 1924 with Robert La Follette’s ill-fated presidential race; and again in 1948 with Henry A. Wallace’s candidacy, which was red as red could be.

Who’s to say the Republican Party doesn’t end up much the same way?

The Republicans have a Republican problem: a growing minority of rank and file supporters hates their leaders. No exaggeration.

A Pew Research survey in July of 2,000 U.S. adults found that 68 percent of Republican voters expressed a favorable opinion of their party. That was down from 86 percent just six months earlier. (For what it’s worth, 86 percent of Democrats surveyed view their party favorably, virtually unchanged from January.)

This partly explains the current popularity of Donald Trump, whose negatives seem to be a positive for about a third of would-be Republican primary voters.

But it also lends credence the emerging popularity of Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, both of whom made their names and fame in the private sector. Carson was a nationally renowned pediatric neurosurgeon who became a conservative superstar in 2013 when he criticized President Obama as he sat just a few feet away at the National Prayer Breakfast. Fiorina is a former CEO who often speaks well but left a mixed legacy at Hewlett-Packard.

Carson has caught up with Trump in the polls in Iowa. Fiorina has displaced GOP stalwarts like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, former Fox News host (and former Arkansas Governor) Mike Huckabee, and Ohio Governor John Kasich in primary polling, and in the course of a month has narrowed her gap from 11.3 percentage points to 6.3 percentage points behind Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical general election matchup.

Republican voters really don’t want a status quo candidate. If the GOP leadership cannot take advantage of majorities in both houses, what good is it? Republican candidates cannot go to voters over and over again with the same promises and ominous warnings if they won’t deliver.

The GOP’s circumstances today are not unlike those that brought down another powerful 19th century political party: the Whigs.

The Whig Party emerged from the wreckage not of the Federalist Party but rather Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party. They were modernizers. They believed strongly in “internal improvements” — what we would call federal infrastructure.

The Whigs opposed Andrew Jackson’s policies, which they saw as destructive, divisive and factional. Instead, they promoted what Whig Party founder Henry Clay called the “American System,” which promoted rapid economic and industrial growth. They counted John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln among their leaders, and four Whigs occupied the White House during the party’s heyday: William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore.

So what happened? The nation in the 1840s and ‘50s became increasingly divided over expansion and slavery. The Whigs simply weren’t up to the task of addressing the most profound moral and political question of the day. Northern Whigs were more interested in promoting business interests and national unity, and to the extent they paid attention to slavery, they thought it could be checked through political compromise.

To make a very long story short, Fillmore and Webster pushed the Compromise of 1850, which sought to admit California as a free state while assuaging the fear of Southerners that the federal government would prevent the spread of slavery altogether. (Southern congressional members, including many Whigs, voted to defeat the so-called Wilmot Proviso, which would have done just that.)

Compromise accomplished nothing — except the ultimate dissolution of the Whig Party. Intellectually, politically and morally, the national Whig Party was bankrupt. Anti-slavery Whigs who believed that slavery was incompatible with free labor and free markets helped form the Republican Party in 1854, from which Lincoln quickly emerged as a national leader. The very best of the Whig platform, which touted personal and economic liberty, survived and thrived under the Republicans. 
 
Today’s Republican Party resembles the Whig Party of 1850 — accused by some, even from within the party, as being intellectually and politically bankrupt, to say nothing of morally suspect. On the most pressing policy issues of the day, from health care and entitlements to religious liberty and national defense, the Republican leadership in Congress appears paralyzed. From the outside looking in, Congress appears more interested in passing a pork-laden highway bill than paring back ObamaCare. The Republicans couldn’t even manage to stop a wildly unpopular deal to allow Iran to develop its nuclear program unhindered by economic sanctions or international oversight.

The real question is, where are the statesmen? What might emerge out of a moribund and impotent Republican Party? Where will voters turn? Change can be good. Out of the destruction of old institutions may emerge vibrant new ones.

But optimism is difficult when the alternatives to the status quo are anger, inexperience and disgust. Perhaps what America needs now is a new dose of the old Whiggery — a message of national unity forged by top-to-bottom economic growth, new infrastructure, and a re-dedication to defending the country without necessarily an overweening desire to transform the whole planet. It worked before. Maybe it would work again.