Actually I was thinking about it and I sort of believe we've been heading incrementally in this direction since WWII as the Congress has handed over more and more power to the Executive. I'm not really sure that we'll return to truly normal politics but given enough time, the least outrageous crap that the Republicans pull routinely will be seen as normal if they just get off the bat**** crazy wagon. I guess I'm more arguing that light treason (to use a phrase) will become the new normal such that neither side would be held accountable for it when they engage in it. And of course only one side will engage in it so even as the demographs turn on them they'll be able to hold onto at least enough power to prevent a total wipeout.
To me it is a broader issue than the usurping of Congressional prerogatives by the executive. That is part of the mix, to be sure, and it is a worrisome trend in that it has given Trump a freer hand than he would have had otherwise, but I think the issues at stake here are historically "larger" than that. Basically, the left had decisively won the culture wars by the mid-20th century (they won the battle of political-economic ideas even earlier, as the Depression showed everyone what the cult of the free market is worth, and the right-wing alternative to that cult, fascism, was discredited by World War II etc), and the right recognized that it could no longer make its honest case to the American people. So they got a few extra decades of power by engaging in a long-term intellectual project of redefining words and framing their attacks on civilization and the American idea as defenses of civilization and the American idea.
This worked for a while as a last-ditch effort to maintain power, but too many people have noticed that the actual consequences of right-wing policies are disastrous for everyone but the richest stratum of society. So, as Tim says, the noose is tightening on the Republicans...and as a result they are casting aside norms, becoming more-or-less openly contemptuous of democracy, because they know that they cannot achieve their political goals through the normal processes of parliamentary politics. And the problem is that the intellectual project
worked, worked in a way that probably exceeded the wildest expectations of its architects. That is why we now have Trump, why even formerly moderate Republicans like
James Comey or
Norm Ornstein (the Ornstein piece was written in 2012, long before Trump) are coming out and saying that the Republican Party represents an unprecedented, existential threat to the US.
The sort of Constitutional failures that you're talking about with the Executive getting more and more power are sort of stress points where they system can easily be made to collapse entirely under the sort of pressure I'm talking about. When norms are so important for governing because your Constitution was written in 1789, for a party to decide that the norms and processes are to be treated as a vehicle for accomplishing partisan political objectives, is a fatal danger to the system.
This, incidentally, is why we need to completely overhaul the Constitution at the first opportunity. But that can only be accomplished after the real problem, the Republican Party, has been dealt with...one way or another.