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the absence of limits on the amount individuals or corporations can donate has contributed to the ongoing erosion of public confidence in the political process in the UK, according to one watchdog organization. "When donors are making contributions exceeding £20,000 ($31,000) -- and some are making donations well over £250,000 ($390,000) -- it's perfectly understandable you don't give away that kind of money without expecting something in return,"

n Norway, government funding accounted for 74% of political parties' income in 2010, according to Statistics Norway. And unlike in the U.S., where candidates and their supporters can buy as much television time as they can afford, political ads are banned from television and radio.

Corruption monitors say the lack of public funding in India, the world's largest democracy, has contributed to a staggering influx of under the table corporate contributions to candidates that has undercut the integrity of recent elections.

Intelligence reports received by India's Electoral Commission suggested that upwards of $2 billion in so-called "black money" will be spent to influence the Uttar Pradesh state elections this year, according to Anupama Jha, executive director of TI India."Everybody knows about black money," Jha told CNN. "Corporations are expected to donate no more than 5 percent of their profits, but they pay more than that under the table. Those who donate funds also control the politicians, and the politicians (become) more accountable to their sponsors than to their constituents."

ut it's not just corporate black money that's a problem, but the buying of votes in poor areas with hard cash, and sometimes with smuggled liquor.

In the 2009 election in Tamil Nadu, a state with a population roughly the size of France, 33.4% of voters received money from candidates' supporters for their vote, according to a poll by India's Centre of Media Studies -- and in 2011, voters were lured to the polls with blenders, grinders and other household appliances.

"This is why good people don't want to contest elections ... so ultimately you vote for corrupt people, because those are the only people you have to choose from."

The parties try to hijack whatever they can hijack in Russia," Panfilova told CNN

"There are two sets of rules in Russia -- one set for parties who are paying out of their own pockets, and another for the party and candidates with access to public resources," says Elena Panfilova, head of TI Russia.

While there are no limitations on the amount U.S. political parties can spend on televison ads, broadcast time in Russia is doled out on a limited basis, and is proportionate to the results of the last election.

Roughly $2 billion was spent by parties and candidates in the 2010 presidential election, according to Claudio Weber Abramo, executive director of TI Brazil.

Nearly 98% of winner Dilma Rouseff's campaign donations -- and 95.5% of her main opponent's -- came from corporations, says Abramo.Abramo says corporations donated 99.04% of all money spent in Sao Paulo, Brazil's most populous state, during the 2010 election -- a reflection mainly of voters' apathy and politicians' failure to form relationships with their constituents.

"The distribution of money reveals something deeper in the Brazilian political landscape, which is that citizens are not very much concerned about supporting parties and having a political life."While some observers want to ban corporate spending outright, Abramo says that will only make it harder to track corporate influence on politics in the country."The interests are still there even if you prohibit corporations from donating to candidates above the board," he told CNN. "They will do it in a hidden way, and they will lose visibility."

no reliable information exists for how much money was spent during the 2011 presidential election in Nigeria.

While Nigerian law gives the country's election commission the right to set a maximum spending limit for parties, the commission neglected to do so before the 2011 election, according to Magnus Ohman."Parties can do whatever they want, there's no limit to the amount they can spend," Ohman told CNN. "Candidates do have limits, but the money they get from their parties is excluded from that limit."

2011 elections were hailed as a step forward in Nigeria's evolution as a young democracy, the lack of restraint on political spending is a worrying development for election monitors."It really was an expensive election not only at a presidential level but also at the gubernatorial level, especially down in the south," said Ohman. "It's an electoral system where you need to spend."

UK corruption monitor Chandu Krishnan says an ever-increasing amount of money in elections is a global problem."In many countries across the world, the cost of elections is increasing," he told CNN. "If parties and politicians can't find the resources from the state, there is an increasing desperation to seek them from private sources -- and that is where the corruption comes in."

The messaging consists of common themes that recur in various forms. One central theme is a fierce opposition to government, especially so-called “big government.” This reappears in various sub-forms as well, such as rage against bureaucracy, regulations, Washington, D.C., the IRS, the Environmental Protection Agency, and federal politicians.

Another big theme is fear and victimization. You had better watch out because government is gonna getcha! “They,” whoever that may be, are about to take away your rights.  Your freedom is about to disappear.  Your religious liberties will be stripped away.  You won’t be able to make your own healthcare decisions.  Free choice will be gone.  Your children will suffer.

Another common theme is the fear of foreigners, or outsiders. We must protect our own in-group from the vague and mysterious threats posed by those who are a little bit different from us.

And, of course, someone from the Democratic Party, or some “liberal,” is to blame for all of this wreckage. Demonizing a specific target is powerful.  If a Democrat is in the White House, then the president becomes the favorite bullseye.

why would the Republican Party devise such a strategy that has no hope of success? Well, it turns out that they did not devise this strategy. I

t’s not even a strategy at all. It emerged not as a result of a grand Republican master plan, but of market economics.

The extremist right-wing network of Fox News and talk radio was not created by politicians, and it is not funded by a political party.  It is not supported by donations from people seeking political expression.  It was created for one central purpose: to make money.

the business of peddling hate and anger is a fantastically profitable one.

Rush Limbaugh raked in $80 million for himself in 2015 alone. Sean Hannity was paid $30 million. Glenn Beck is personally worth over $100 million. Bill O’Reilly’s prime-time show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” generates over $100 million per year in advertising revenue.

Fox News has dominated the ratings as the number one cable news channel for the last 14 years and reportedly earns over $1 billion in profits annually, making it a golden goose in the overall Fox corporate empire.  Fox itself is one of the most valuable brands in the world with sales of over $13 billion.  And the tycoon behind Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, is personally worth $12 billion.

Corporate profits are greatly impacted by governmental policies.  Corporations, therefore, desire the government to be controlled by whichever political party is the most favorable to corporate profits.  And this, of course, is the Republican Party.

it is indeed a cozy little business model.  The network builds an audience by appealing to people’s fear, insecurity and anger, and simultaneously directs its audience to support the right-wing political party that best protects the network’s own profits.

From a political perspective, it is certainly not healthy to incite anger and hate within a nation’s own population.  And it is not very wise to inflame hostility and rage against a nation’s own government

from a political perspective of creating a cohesive society and maintaining peace and harmony among the population, this is disastrous.

politicians in the Republican Party could not resist.  The extremist right-wing network of Fox News and talk radio had built up an audience that could easily be exploited for political support. 

An unholy alliance was formed.  The Republican Party would allow the extremist right-wing network to promulgate its destructive propaganda throughout society in order to generate its enormous profits, and in exchange, the network would direct its audience to vote for the Republican Party.

So for years and years, the extremist right-wing media network spewed out content full of anger, hate, and division.  And Republican politicians jumped on the bandwagon.  They began preaching the same destructive messages and appearing on the extremist right-wing network all across the nation.

It worked.The base of the Republican Party grew more and more angry.  Their resentment against our very own government grew ever greater.  Their sense of victimization became ever more acute.  Their fury at the establishment boiled over.

The base of the Republican Party became a Frankenstein. It became radicalized into an extreme movement that turned against the established order, including the leadership of the Republican Party itself. 

This is the reason behind the rise of candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.  The Republican Party establishment despises these candidates, but the party has no idea how to slay these dragons.

Richard Nixon’s administration was also riddled with criminality—but in 1973, the Republican Party of Hugh Scott, the Senate minority leader, and John Rhodes, the House minority leader, was still a normal organization. It played by the rules.

The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power—power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means.

Taking away democratic rights—extreme gerrymandering; blocking an elected president from nominating a Supreme Court justice; selectively paring voting rolls and polling places; creating spurious anti-fraud commissions; misusing the census to undercount the opposition; calling lame-duck legislative sessions to pass laws against the will of the voters—is the Republican Party’s main political strategy, and will be for years to come.

Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering—in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats—so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results.

Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote.

The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. It strikes at the heart of democracy. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means.

there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing

During this first insurgency, the abiding contours of the movement took shape.

The Republican Party we know is a product of the modern conservative movement, and that movement is a series of insurgencies against the established order.

The first insurgency was the nomination of Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. He campaigned as a rebel against the postwar American consensus and the soft middle of his own party’s leadership. Goldwater didn’t use the standard, reassuring lexicon of the big tent and the mainstream. At the San Francisco convention, he embraced extremism and denounced the Republican establishment, whose “moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

the political opposition wasn’t just wrong—it was a sinister conspiracy with totalitarian goals.

Republicans have chosen contraction and authoritarianism because, unlike the Democrats, their party isn’t a coalition of interests in search of a majority. Its character is ideological.

conservatives nursed a victim’s sense of grievance—the system was stacked against them, cabals of the powerful were determined to lock them out—and they showed more energetic interest than their opponents in the means of gaining power: mass media, new techniques of organizing, rhetoric, ideas.

The new leader is like his authoritarian counterparts abroad: illiberal, demagogic, hostile to institutional checks, demanding and receiving complete acquiescence from the party, and enmeshed in the financial corruption that is integral to the political corruption of these regimes.

modern conservatism would never stop flirting with hostility toward whole groups of Americans. And from the start this stance opened the movement to extreme, sometimes violent fellow travelers.

It took only 16 years, with the election of Ronald Reagan, for the movement and party to merge. During those years, conservatives hammered away at institutional structures, denouncing the established ones for their treacherous liberalism, and building alternatives, in the form of well-funded right-wing foundations, think tanks, business lobbies, legal groups, magazines, publishers, professorships. When Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the products of this “counter-establishment” (from the title of Sidney Blumenthal’s book on the subject) were ready to take power.

But conservatism remained an insurgent politics during the 1980s and ’90s, and the more power it amassed—in government, business, law, media—the more it set itself against the fragile web of established norms and delighted in breaking them.

The second insurgency was led by Newt Gingrich

Gingrich liked to quote Mao’s definition of politics as “war without blood.” He made audiotapes that taught Republican candidates how to demonize the opposition with labels such as “disgrace,” “betray,” and  “traitors.” When he became speaker of the House, at the head of yet another revolution, Gingrich announced, “There will be no compromise.” How could there be, when he was leading a crusade to save American civilization from its liberal enemies?

Unlike Goldwater and Reagan, Gingrich never had any deeply felt ideology. It was hard to say exactly what “American civilization” meant to him. What he wanted was power, and what he most obviously enjoyed was smashing things to pieces in its pursuit. His insurgency started the conservative movement on the path to nihilism.

The party purged itself of most remaining moderates, growing ever-more shallow as it grew ever-more conservative

Jeff Flake, the outgoing senator from Arizona (whose conservative views come with a democratic temperament), describes this deterioration as “a race to the bottom to see who can be meaner and madder and crazier. It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.”

The viciousness doesn’t necessarily reside in the individual souls of Republican leaders. It flows from the party’s politics, which seeks to delegitimize opponents and institutions, purify the ranks through purges and coups, and agitate followers with visions of apocalypse—all in the name of an ideological cause that every year loses integrity as it becomes indistinguishable from power itself.

The third insurgency came in reaction to the election of Barack Obama—it was the Tea Party.

In the third insurgency, the features of the original movement surfaced again, more grotesque than ever: paranoia and conspiracy thinking; racism and other types of hostility toward entire groups; innuendos and incidents of violence.

Finally, the movement was founded in the politics of racism. Goldwater’s strongest support came from white southerners reacting against civil rights.

In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter.

Its leaders don’t see a dilemma—democratic principles turn out to be disposable tools, sometimes useful, sometimes inconvenient. The higher cause is conservatism, but the highest is power. After Wisconsin Democrats swept statewide offices last month, Robin Vos, speaker of the assembly, explained why Republicans would have to get rid of the old rules: “We are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.”

As Bertolt Brecht wrote of East Germany’s ruling party: Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?

The project of American democracy — to live beyond such tribal identities, to construct a society based on the individual, to see ourselves as citizens of a people’s republic, to place religion off-limits, and even in recent years to embrace a multiracial and post-religious society — was always an extremely precarious endeavor. It rested, from the beginning, on an 18th-century hope that deep divides can be bridged by a culture of compromise, and that emotion can be defeated by reason.

Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience. It comes more naturally to us than any other way of life. For the overwhelming majority of our time on this planet, the tribe was the only form of human society. We lived for tens of thousands of years in compact, largely egalitarian groups of around 50 people or more, connected to each other by genetics and language, usually unwritten.

Tribal cohesion was essential to survival, and our first religions emerged for precisely this purpose.

Religion therefore fused with communal identity and purpose, it was integral to keeping the enterprise afloat, and the idea of people within a tribe believing in different gods was incomprehensible. Such heretics would be killed.

we became a deeply cooperative species — but primarily with our own kind. The notion of living alongside people who do not look like us and treating them as our fellows was meaningless for most of human history.

Successful modern democracies do not abolish this feeling; they co-opt it. Healthy tribalism endures in civil society in benign and overlapping ways.

in our neighborhood and community; in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals; among our fellow enthusiasts

most critically, there is the Über-tribe that constitutes the nation-state, a megatribe that unites a country around shared national rituals, symbols, music, history, mythology, and events, that forms the core unit of belonging that makes a national democracy possible.

Tribalism only destabilizes a democracy when it calcifies into something bigger and more intense than our smaller, multiple loyalties; when it rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole; and when it turns rival tribes into enemies. And the most significant fact about American tribalism today is that all three of these characteristics now apply to our political parties, corrupting and even threatening our system of government.

If I were to identify one profound flaw in the founding of America, it would be its avoidance of our tribal nature

The founders were suspicious of political parties altogether — but parties defined by race and religion and class and geography? I doubt they’d believe a republic could survive that, and they couldn’t and didn’t foresee it. In fact, as they conceived of a new society that would protect the individual rights of all humanity, they explicitly excluded a second tribe among them: African-American slaves

But it did happen here, on a fault line that closely resembles today’s tribal boundary.

in the first half of the 20th century, with immigration sharply curtailed after 1924, the world wars acted as great unifiers and integrators. Our political parties became less polarized by race, as the FDR Democrats managed to attract more black voters as well as ethnic and southern whites. By 1956, nearly 40 percent of black voters still backed the GOP.

The re-racialization of our parties began with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, when the GOP lost almost all of the black vote. It accelerated under Nixon’s “southern strategy” in the wake of the civil-rights revolution. By Reagan’s reelection, the two parties began to cohere again into the Civil War pattern, and had simply swapped places.

The greatest threat to a politician today therefore is less a candidate from the opposing party than a more ideologically extreme primary opponent. The incentives for cross-tribal compromise have been eviscerated, and those for tribal extremism reinforced.

When it actually came to undoing the reform earlier this year, the GOP had precious little intellectual capital to fall back on, no alternative way to keep millions insured, no history of explaining to voters outside their own tribe what principles they were even trying to apply.

Add to this the great intellectual sorting of America, in which, for generations, mass college education sifted countless gifted young people from the heartland and deposited them in increasingly left-liberal universities and thereafter the major cities, from which they never returned, and then the shifting of our economy to favor the college-educated, which only deepened the urban-rural divide.

The myths that helped us unite as a nation began to fray. We once had a widely accepted narrative of our origins, shared icons that defined us, and a common pseudo-ethnicity — “whiteness” — into which new immigrants were encouraged to assimilate.

we should be clear-eyed about the consequence. We can no longer think of the Puritans without acknowledging the genocide that followed them; we cannot celebrate our Founding Fathers without seeing that slavery undergirded the society they constructed; we must tear down our Confederate statues and relitigate our oldest rifts. Even the national anthem now divides those who stand from those who kneel. We dismantled many of our myths, but have not yet formed new ones to replace them.

The result of all this is that a lopsided 69 percent of white Christians now vote Republican, while the Democrats get only 31. In the last decade, the gap in Christian identification between Democrats and Republicans has increased by 50 percent. In 2004, 44 percent of Latinos voted Republican for president; in 2016, 29 percent did. Forty-three percent of Asian-Americans voted Republican in 2004; in 2016, 29 percent did. Since 2004, the most populous urban counties have also swung decisively toward the Democrats, in both blue and red states, while rural counties have shifted sharply to the GOP

When three core components of a tribal identity — race, religion, and geography — define your political parties, you’re in serious trouble.

Some countries where tribal cleavages spawned by ethnic and linguistic differences have long existed understand this and have constructed systems of government designed to ameliorate the consequences

There is no neutral presidency here, and so when a rank tribalist wins the office and governs almost entirely in the interests of the hardest core of his base, half the country understandably feels as if it were under siege. Our two-party, winner-take-all system only works when both parties are trying to appeal to the same constituencies on a variety of issues.

Our undemocratic electoral structure exacerbates things. Donald Trump won 46 percent of the vote, attracting 3 million fewer voters than his opponent, but secured 56 percent of the Electoral College. Republicans won 44 percent of the vote in the Senate seats up for reelection last year, but 65 percent of the seats. To have one tribe dominate another is one thing; to have the tribe that gained fewer votes govern the rest — and be the head of state — is testing political stability.

Slowly our political culture becomes one in which the two parties see themselves not as participating in a process of moving the country forward, sometimes by tilting to the right and sometimes to the left, as circumstances permit, alternating in power, compromising when in opposition, moderating when in government — but one where the goal is always the obliteration of the other party by securing a permanent majority, in an unending process of construction and demolition.

And so by 2017, 41 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of Democrats said they disagreed not just with their opponents’ political views but with their values and goals beyond politics as well.

61 percent of Trump supporters say there’s nothing he could do to make them change their minds about him; 57 percent of his opponents say the same thing. Nothing he could do.

When criticized by a member of a rival tribe, a tribalist will not reflect on his own actions or assumptions but instantly point to the same flaw in his enemy.

By the 2000 election, we were introduced to the red-blue map, though by then we could already recognize the two tribes it identified as they fought to a national draw. Choosing a president under those circumstances caused a constitutional crisis, one the Supreme Court resolved at the expense of losing much of its nonpartisan, nontribal authority.

In America, the intellectual elites, far from being a key rational bloc resisting this, have succumbed. The intellectual right and the academic left have long since dispensed with the idea of a mutual exchange of ideas.

Conservatism thrived in America when it was dedicated to criticizing liberalism’s failures, engaging with it empirically, and offering practical alternatives to the same problems. It has since withered into an intellectual movement that does little but talk to itself and guard its ideological boundaries.

among tribal conservatives, the Iraq War remained a taboo topic when it wasn’t still regarded as a smashing success, tax cuts were still the solution to every economic woe, free trade was all benefit and no cost, and so on. Health care was perhaps the most obvious example of this intellectual closure. Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act was immediate and total. Even though the essential contours of the policy had been honed at the Heritage Foundation, even though a Republican governor had pioneered it in Massachusetts, and even though that governor became the Republican nominee in 2012, the anathematization of it defined the GOP for seven years.

the now near-ubiquitous trend of “whataboutism,” as any glance at a comments section or a cable slugfest will reveal. The Soviets perfected this in the Cold War, deflecting from their horrific Gulags by pointing, for example, to racial strife in the U.S. It tells you a lot about our time that a tactic once honed in a global power struggle between two nations now occurs within one.

George Orwell famously defined this mind-set as identifying yourself with a movement, “placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” It’s typified, he noted, by self-contradiction and indifference to reality

As for indifference to reality, today’s Republicans cannot accept that human-produced carbon is destroying the planet, and today’s Democrats must believe that different outcomes for men and women in society are entirely a function of sexism. Even now, Democrats cannot say the words illegal immigrants or concede that affirmative action means discriminating against people because of their race. Republicans cannot own the fact that big tax cuts have not trickled down, or that President Bush authorized the brutal torture of prisoners, thereby unequivocally committing war crimes.

Orwell again: “There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case … still one cannot feel that it is wrong.” That is as good a summary of tribalism as you can get, that it substitutes a feeling — a really satisfying one — for an argument.

When a party leader in a liberal democracy proposes a shift in direction, there is usually an internal debate. It can go on for years. When a tribal leader does so, the tribe immediately jumps on command. And so the Republicans went from free trade to protectionism, and from internationalism to nationalism, almost overnight

And then there is the stance of white Evangelicals, a pillar of the red tribe. Among their persistent concerns has long been the decline of traditional marriage, the coarsening of public discourse, and the centrality of personal virtue to the conduct of public office.

In the 1990s, they assailed Bill Clinton as the font of decadence; then they lionized George W. Bush, who promised to return what they often called “dignity” to the Oval Office. And yet when a black Democrat with exemplary personal morality, impeccable public civility, a man devoted to his wife and children and a model for African-American fathers, entered the White House, they treated him as a threat to civilization

And when they encountered a foulmouthed pagan who bragged of grabbing women by the pussy, used the tabloids to humiliate his wife, married three times, boasted about the hotness of his own daughter, touted the size of his own dick in a presidential debate, and spoke of avoiding STDs as his personal Vietnam, they gave him more monolithic support than any candidate since Reagan, including born-again Bush and squeaky-clean Romney.

In 2011, a poll found that only 30 percent of white Evangelicals believed that private immorality was irrelevant for public life. This month, the same poll found that the number had skyrocketed to 72 percent.

Total immersion within one’s tribe also leads to increasingly extreme ideas. The word “hate,” for example, has now become a one-stop replacement for a whole spectrum of varying, milder emotions involved with bias toward others:

Or take the current promiscuous use of the term “white supremacist.” We used to know what that meant. It meant advocates and practitioners of slavery, believers in the right of white people to rule over all others, subscribers to a theory of a master race, Jim Crow supporters, George Wallace voters.

But it is now routinely used on the left to mean, simply, racism in a multicultural America, in which European-Americans are a fast-evaporating ethnic majority.

Liberals should be able to understand this by reading any conservative online journalism and encountering the term “the left.” It represents a large, amorphous blob of malevolent human beings, with no variation among them, no reasonable ideas, nothing identifiably human at all

It’s not easy to be optimistic with Trump as president. And given his malignant narcissism, despotic instincts, absence of empathy, and constant incitement of racial and xenophobic hatred, it’s extremely hard not to be tribal in return. There is no divide he doesn’t want to deepen, no conflict he doesn’t want to start or intensify. How on earth can we not “resist”?

In 2015, did any of us anticipate that neo-Nazis would be openly parading with torches on a college campus or that antifa activists would be proudly extolling violence as the only serious response to the Trump era?

In fact, the person best positioned to get us out of this tribal trap would be … well … bear with me … Trump. The model would be Bill Clinton, the first president to meet our newly configured divide. Clinton leveraged the loyalty of Democrats thrilled to regain the White House in order to triangulate toward centrist compromises with the GOP. You can argue about the merits of the results, but he was able to govern, to move legislation forward, to reform welfare, reduce crime, turn the deficit into a surplus, survive impeachment, and end his term a popular president.

The Democrats are now, surprisingly, confronting a choice many thought they would only face in a best-case-scenario midterm election, and their political calculus is suddenly much more complicated than pure resistance. Might the best interest of the country be served by working with Trump? And if they do win the House in 2018, should they seek to destroy Trump’s presidency, much like GOP leaders in Congress chose to do with Obama? Should they try to end it through impeachment, as the GOP attempted with Bill Clinton? Or could they try to moderate the tribal divide?

if the Democrats try to impeach a president who has no interest in the stability or integrity of our liberal democracy, and if his base sees it, as they will, as an Establishment attempt at nullifying their vote, are we really prepared to handle the civil unrest and constitutional crisis that would almost certainly follow?

Tribalism is not a static force. It feeds on itself. It appeals on a gut level and evokes emotions that are not easily controlled and usually spiral toward real conflict. And there is no sign that the deeper forces that have accelerated this — globalization, social atomization, secularization, media polarization, ever more multiculturalism — will weaken

But we should not delude ourselves that this is all a Trump problem.

As utopian as it sounds, I truly believe all of us have to at least try to change the culture from the ground up. There are two ideas that might be of help, it seems to me. The first is individuality.

I mean valuing the unique human being — distinct from any group identity, quirky, full of character and contradictions, skeptical, rebellious, immune to being labeled or bludgeoned into a broader tribal grouping. This cultural antidote to tribalism, left and right, is still here in America and ready to be rediscovered

I may be an extreme case, but we all are nonconformist to some degree. Nurturing your difference or dissent from your own group is difficult; appreciating the individuality of those in other tribes is even harder. It takes effort and imagination, openness to dissent, even an occasional embrace of blasphemy.

we also need mutual forgiveness. It doesn’t matter if you believe, as I do, that the right bears the bulk of the historical blame. No tribal conflict has ever been unwound without magnanimity. Yitzhak Rabin had it, but it was not enough. Nelson Mandela had it, and it was

But this requires, of course, first recognizing our own tribal thinking. So much of our debates are now an easy either/or rather than a complicated both/and. In our tribal certainties, we often distort what we actually believe in the quiet of our hearts, and fail to see what aspects of truth the other tribe may grasp.

Not all resistance to mass immigration or multiculturalism is mere racism or bigotry; and not every complaint about racism and sexism is baseless. Many older white Americans are not so much full of hate as full of fear.

The actual solutions to our problems are to be found in the current no-man’s-land that lies between the two tribes. Reentering it with empiricism and moderation to find different compromises for different issues is the only way out of our increasingly dangerous impasse.

All of this runs deeply against the grain. It’s counterintuitive. It’s emotionally unpleasant. It fights against our very DNA. Compared with bathing in the affirming balm of a tribe, it’s deeply unsatisfying. But no one ever claimed that living in a republic was going to be easy — if we really want to keep it.

Physically, it is the Czar's old Russian Empire with certain major changes. On the eve of World War I, Nicholas II ruled a domain of 6.8 million square miles with a population of 139 million. It included Poland, semi‐independent Finland and the Baltic states.

Lenin lost almost all the empire in the worst days of 1918‐19. But Germany's defeat and the end of civil war and intervention restored to the Bolsheviks most of Russia—minus Finland, Poland and the Baltic states.

Stalin restored the Empire after World War II.

Today the Kremlin holds direct sway over 8.6 million square miles. The population has risen to 250 million souls, as the Czar would have said. Even that great population figure falls shy of Soviet aspirations.

steadily dropping birthrate, a by‐product of Russian urbanization and that most chronic of Russian problems, overcrowded housing.

All of Russia's ethnics are uneasy and unhappy. This one of the problems Mr. Brezhnev will not touch upon at the Party Congress. The issue is simple: a demand for ethnic and racial equality and justice. The Soviet Union divided into 15 “national republics” and many more ethnic regions and districts. But genuine equality does not exist.

Year after year Moscow purges poets, editors and party leaders in Tashkent, Kiev or Riga on charges of “bourgeois nationalism,” “feudal tendencies” “chauvinism.” In other words, for being local patriots.

no one ever purges Moscow of Great Russian chauvinism.

Mimeographs have circulated among young party members, the Communist Youth, calling for “purity of Russian blood” terms remarkably like Hitler Youth racist language.

in the other Russia, the real Russia, antisemitism is chronic. Russia was the traditional home of the hateful prejudice. Many of Hitler's antisemitic fables were drawn from Russian sources. Today antisemitism is encouraged by official propagandists.

bout 150,000 Jews have migrated from the Soviet Union in recent years. The Soviet census lists something over two million cititzens as ethnic Jews.

The actual total is over three million, perhaps four. But many have assimilated or,prefer to conceal their true identity because of the discriminations—inability to enter the foreign services, the higher cadres of the party, the upper echelons of the army and other elite posts, including academic ones.

The Party Congress will emphasize the positive: the rise in the standard of living, or industrial wages now averaging 146 rubles (about $193) a month against 126 rubles five years ago. Meat consumption has risen; the average Russian ate 40 more eggs in 1974 than in 1970.

But no one will whisper about the private stores to which high party and Government officials have access

The Communist Party is organized from the bottom up. Small cells exist in every unit of Soviet society—office, factory, shop, school, institute, laboratory. These form a local organization directed by a party secretary, appointed by the district or republic secretary, all controlled by the Party Secretariat in Moscow. In theory, the Party Congress, meeting every three to five years, is the supreme authority. In reality, of course, the party is run by an inner oligarchy, the 12‐ to 14‐member Politburo.

Not that the party bosses do not know the realities. They

They know the real Russia but they also know that to hang onto the ladder they must protect their flanks.

it has become much tougher for either to amass a commanding Senate majority.

The fact that neither side will control more than 52 seats after Tuesday means that either party has held at least 55 Senate seats in only three congressional sessions since 2000.

So I think the closeness of it -- whether it's 52-48 or 50-50 or 51-49 -- is probably good for him and good for the country, because he is going to know how to deal in that type of a Senate."

The narrow majorities have also contributed to a Senate that has grown more rigid, with much more partisan conflict and less of the ad hoc bipartisan deal-making that characterized the body through the second half of the 20th century. The Senate will mark a new high -- or low -- in its rising partisanship on Wednesday when about a quarter or more of Republican senators will vote against recognizing Democrat Joe Biden's election as president

some observers believe that the narrow Senate division certain to emerge from Tuesday's election will encourage a return to bipartisan deal-making, like the agreement between centrist Republican and Democratic senators that helped break the months-long stalemate over Covid economic relief legislation.

almost all of the senators in both parties who had won their split-ticket victories in the 2008 and 2012 presidential races lost their seats in the next midterm elections (2014 and 2018, respectively).

other observers note that the narrow Senate majorities of recent years have, in practice, produced very few bipartisan compromises.

With control constantly at risk, the majority party faces heightened pressure for lockstep unity, while the minority party never has much incentive to help the majority burnish its record with bipartisan accomplishments that could buttress its advantage in the next election.

Whatever the results of Tuesday's Georgia elections between Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler and Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, respectively, those polarizing dynamics are guaranteed to remain in force, because the party that falls into the minority now will remain close enough to immediately begin plotting how to recapture the majority in 2022

the meager three majorities of 55 seats or more since 2000 represent the fewest times that any party has accumulated at least 55% of the Senate seats over a 20-year span since the turn of the 20th century, according to official Senate records.

As recently as 2008, six Senate candidates (five Democrats and Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine) won election in states that supported the other side's presidential candidate. In 2012, four Democrats and Republican Dean Heller of Nevada won Senate races in states that voted the other way for president.

in 2016, for the first time since the direct election of senators around World War I, the same party won the Senate and the presidential race in every state.

The huge Democratic Senate majorities that persisted from the late 1950s through the mid-1990s were rooted in the party's continued dominance of Senate seats from Southern states that routinely voted Republican for president, notes Sarah Binder, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. But over the past generation, it has become much more difficult for either party to win Senate seats in states that usually vote the other way in presidential elections.

The "return of GOP South and decline in split-ticket voting and increased nationalization of US politics generally" explains "a good amount of the decline in Senate majority margins in recent decades," notes Binder.

Over the past two presidential elections, 20 states have voted both times against Trump; Democrats now hold fully 39 of their 40 Senate seats, all but Collins' in Maine. But 25 states have voted both times for Trump, and Republicans now hold 47 of their 50 seats, all but Joe Manchin's in West Virginia, Jon Tester's in Montana and Sherrod Brown's in Ohio.

In the five states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) that backed Trump in 2016 but switched to Biden in 2020, Democrats now hold six Senate seats and Republicans two, pending the results in Georgia

from 1981 through 2000, Democrats held at least 55 seats in four sessions, while Republicans reached that level of control in three

One party also controlled at least 55% of the Senate seats (which were fewer than 100 at that point because there were fewer states) in eight of the 10 congressional sessions from 1921 through 1940 and seven of the 10 from 1901 through 1920. Only the 1950s saw anything like today's precarious balances: While Democrats controlled at least 55% of the seats four times from 1941 to 1950, neither side reached that level through four consecutive sessions beginning in 1951, until Democrats broke through with big gains in the 1958 election.

Unless Republicans win both of Tuesday's runoffs, the party controlling the Senate will hold a majority of two seats or fewer. That would mark the fifth time since 2000 that the majority party held such a narrow advantage.

Again, the growing correlation between presidential and Senate outcomes may be a key factor in the shift. Pending the Georgia results, only three senators in each party represent states that supported the other side's presidential candidate this year. That means the vast majority of Democratic senators have a strong electoral incentive to support Biden --and the vast majority of Republican senators have a comparable incentive to oppose him.

Breaux, the former Democratic senator, believes the narrow balance of power can overcome that centrifugal pressure by providing small groups of relatively centrist deal-makers from each party the leverage to build majority legislative coalitions.

"You can form coalitions starting in the middle and then moving out on each side until you create a majority," he says.

in general Democrats now enter the political arena as the party of wealth.

Traditionally, “the right,” for better and for worse, is the party of large property holdings, of bosses and managers and cultural guardians, of dominant belief systems (religious and secular), and of elite education institutions that set the boundaries of what knowledge and lore are proper to pass on to tomorrow’s generations. If America has such a party today, it is not the Republicans.

Biden’s most loyal followers by occupation included professors (94 percent), librarians (93 percent), therapists (92 percent), and lawyers (88 percent)

Trump got homemakers (96 percent), welders (84 percent), HVAC professionals (82 percent), farmers (75 percent), and custodians (59 percent)

They are also the party of education and prestige. On the eve of November’s election, Bloomberg News analyzed which employees gave the most to Donald Trump and which the most to Joe Biden. Biden swept the commanding heights of the economy. He got 97 percent of the contributions at Google and Facebook, 96 percent at Harvard, 91 percent at the consultants Deloitte, and (back here on planet Earth) 90 percent at the New York City Department of Education

Krein doubts whether anything that could be described as Trumpism happened at all. The North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993 was renegotiated to American workers’ advantage, but that did not lead to the renaissance of manufacturing that candidate Trump had tirelessly promised in 2016. The wages of the lowest-paid workers went up, but that may be due to minimum-wage hikes enacted in dozens of states and cities.

“It feels to me like the party’s getting pushed into it,” said Julius Krein, an investor who publishes the quarterly review American Affairs, in an interview this winter. “Donors, especially, don’t want it to be a working-class party. And certainly the old guard not only doesn’t think of itself as such, but is quite hostile to that, and to any policy that could possibly lead in that direction. But it’s getting pushed there because all the elite are going to the Democrats.”

Trump’s administration worked out well for American workers, at least up until Covid hit in the spring of 2020. Unemployment was under 4 percent for most of 2018 and 2019. The good times reached even those to whom prosperity had historically been slowest to arrive. Unemployment among Black men, a whisker under 20 percent in March 2010, had fallen to around 5 percent in November 2019. According to The Economist, gains were concentrated in professions where workers had heretofore faced competition from immigrant labor, such as housekeepers and maintenance workers

the economic hand that Trump had to play in last fall’s elections was stronger than almost anyone outside of the working class understood, and the results—at least in terms of the swing-state popular vote—correspondingly closer.

There is a philosophical disagreement about how one gives the working class more power. To boil it down to the basics, Democrats believe in more unions and Republicans believe in less immigration.

Krein is generally skeptical of the Republican Party’s traditional economic policies. “Contrary to the pervasive mythology of entrepreneurialism and creativity,” he writes, “it is glaringly obvious to today’s professional elite that the neoliberal economy is allocating capital, and especially talent, very poorly.

the extraordinary 2017 tax cuts, the only significant piece of domestic legislation passed in Trump’s four years. A supply-side piñata without precedent, it encouraged the corporate “buybacks” that can spur stock prices (padding executive bonuses) but can destabilize corporate finances (increasing the likelihood of layoffs in a downturn)—quite the opposite of what Trump had seemed to promise on the campaign trail.

Now Rubio has a simpler message: These are my people. I will fight for them. It beats the perennial Republican approach of theorizing about incentives and the capital gains tax.

Among Senate Republicans, it is Rubio who has laid the biggest bet on working people. He has a lot of ideas. He has urged fighting stock buybacks, reauthorizing Small Business Administration loan programs, and limiting Covid aid to universities with endowments of more than $10 billion

The core of his agenda, said Rubio, “is the availability of good-paying jobs that allow people to raise families, to retire with dignity, to live in safe and stable communities—that’s where life is lived.”

Hawley does often sound like a throwback. He criticizes the sexual revolution, the “woke mob,” and those who propose to rechristen military bases named after Confederate generals. In this sense, his appeal to the working class is less direct than Rubio’s. He is using, in classic Reagan fashion, the correlation between working-class status and conservative cultural attitudes to win over voters without making class appeals at all.

In 2008, two young thinkers, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, wrote a book called Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. The authors warn that “Sam’s Club Republicans”—cheekily named after a Walmart-owned chain of cut-price warehouse stores where few urban Democrats had ever set foot—were losing ground. And these voters were beginning to notice that their party wasn’t doing anything for them. The old Republican entrepreneurial rhetoric of unleashing this and untrammeling that was ceasing to resonate. Worse, it now served the other party’s base.If Grand New Party was the first call to arms in the remaking of the party, it went largely unheeded

Until recently, few congressional Democrats have been inclined to do battle with the tech companies, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren being among the conspicuous exceptions.

Tom Cotton, a Harvard-educated Republican lawyer from tiny Yell County, Arkansas, is trying to use China the way Hawley uses Big Tech

When the public compares the two parties on the question of protecting the working class, it is still Democrats who come out on top—but not by a lot.

In early December, Hawley and Bernie Sanders staggered their speeches, swapping floor time back and forth, in hopes of rallying the chamber to deliver Covid aid in $1,200 direct payments to parents. It was eyebrow-raising, Senate staffers said, because such moments require close staff coordination, and each senator pledged solidarity to the other. “I’m proud to yield the floor to him,” said Sanders of Hawley. “I’m delighted to join with Senator Sanders,” Hawley responded, adding: “Working families should be first on our to-do list, not last.”

The most closely attended-to conservative voice on this issue is Oren Cass, a former Mitt Romney adviser who heads American Compass, a conservative think tank that calls for “widely shared economic development.

Nearly all the Republicans loosely aligning themselves with working-class interests listen to Cass, and it’s partly because he has a theory about the economic history of this century and how it led to our present predicament.

As Cass sees it, the weakness of structures has been explained by the work of M.I.T. economist David Autor, who has given us a new understanding of how labor markets work under globalization.

A “China shock” wiped out a good deal of manufacturing employment after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, Autor has shown. “Skill-biased technical change” drove college-educated workers’ compensation up and that of the noncollege-educated down

The economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton gathered similar evidence of the collapse of labor markets and the rise of regional inequality in their 2020 book on opioids, suicide, and life expectancy, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.

J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, a book that is often read as an X-ray of how eastern Ohio and other parts of Appalachia were struggling as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were vying for the presidency in 2016

the embrace of this coming-of-age saga as an all-purpose explanation of Trump’s new pitch to the working class was misguided, for Vance was already in his thirties when it was published. “The story that he is telling,” Cass insisted, “is of what was going on in the late ’90s, during what we think of as the go-go years, the boom years, the very best years.”

Indeed, an interesting general question arises to challenge Republicans about the 1980s and 1990s—were the policies arrived at outright wrong?

“If you talked to Republicans and gave them truth serum,” one congressional political adviser admitted, “a majority would say we had it wrong for decades on immigration and trade. We were too quick to look just at the lower price of goods and how that ultimately helped people, and didn’t spend enough time looking at people who were directly hurt by factories being closed and lower wages.”

Cass’s central insight is: Tight labor markets are good. That is how unions work to drive up wages, and if conservatives want higher wages, they will need to overcome their “foolish orthodoxy” on the matter.

At the same time, you can’t believe unions are good and say any amount of immigration is fine. Limiting immigration raises wages—which is a key reason that the postwar labor movement supported immigration restrictions

From a supply-and-demand perspective, mass immigration does the same thing as offshoring and de-unionizing: It exposes workers with American labor protections and lifestyle expectations to competition from workers without them

Republicans’ rapport with the working class may turn out to be more natural than it now appears. They won’t have to “come up with” policies for helping the workers, still less to “reinvent” themselves as a working-class party

they will follow the logic of the situation to embrace the sort of policies Democrats followed when they were the party of the workers and the Republicans the party of the bosses.

Any depolarizing event would need to be one where the causes are transparently external in a way that makes it hard for social groups to blame each other

Of the episodes since 1950 where democracies polarized, all of those aside from the United States involved less wealthy, less longstanding democracies, many of which had democratized quite recently.

A series of recent analyses reveals the destructive power of polarization across the American political system.

The United States is quite alone among the ranks of perniciously polarized democracies in terms of its wealth and democratic experience

It is increasingly hard to see what sort of event has that feature these days.

None of the wealthy, consolidated democracies of East Asia, Oceania or Western Europe, for example, have faced similar levels of polarization for such an extended period.

“the United States is the only advanced Western democracy to have faced such intense polarization for such an extended period. The United States is in uncharted and very dangerous territory.”

there are “a number of features that make the United States both especially susceptible to polarization and especially impervious to efforts to reduce it.”

The authors point to a number of causes, including “the durability of identity politics in a racially and ethnically diverse democracy.”

the United States has “a unique combination of a majoritarian electoral system with strong minoritarian institutions.”

An additional cause, the authors write, is thatbinary choice is deeply embedded in the U.S. electoral system, creating a rigid two-party system that facilitates binary divisions of society. For example, only five of twenty-six wealthy consolidated democracies elect representatives to their national legislatures in single-member districts.

The United States is perhaps alone in experiencing a demographic shift that poses a threat to the white population that has historically been the dominant group in all arenas of power, allowing political leaders to exploit insecurities surrounding this loss of status.

“The Senate is highly disproportionate in its representation,” they add, “with two senators per state regardless of population, from Wyoming’s 580,000 to California’s 39,500,000 persons,” which, in turn, “translates to disproportionality in the Electoral College — whose indirect election of the president is again exceptional among presidential democracies.”

finally, there is the three-decade trend of partisan sorting, in whichthe two parties reinforce urban-rural, religious-secular and racial-ethnic cleavages rather than promote crosscutting cleavages. With partisanship now increasingly tied to other kinds of social identity, affective polarization is on the rise, with voters perceiving the opposing party in negative terms and as a growing threat to the nation.

Two related studies — “Inequality, Identity and Partisanship: How Redistribution Can Stem the Tide of Mass Polarization” by Alexander J. Stewart, Joshua B. Plotkin and McCarty and “Polarization Under Rising Inequality and Economic Decline” by Stewart, McCarty and Joanna Bryson — argue that aggressive redistribution policies designed to lessen inequality must be initiated before polarization becomes further entrenched

“once polarization sets in, it typically remains stable under individual-level evolutionary dynamics, even when the economic environment improves or inequality is reversed.”

Interactions with more diverse out-group members pool greater knowledge, applicable to a wider variety of situations. These interactions, when successful, generate better solutions and greater benefits. However, we also assume that the risk of failure is higher for out-group interactions

At the same time, the spread of polarization goes far beyond politics, permeating the culture and economic structure of the broader society.

economic scarcity acts as a strong disincentive to cooperative relations between disparate racial and ethnic groups, in large part because such cooperation may produce more benefits but at higher risk:

In other words, a deeply polarized electorate is highly unlikely to support redistribution that would benefit their adversaries as well as themselves.

In times of prosperity, people are more willing to risk failure, they write, but that willingness disappears when populations arefaced with economic decline. We show that such group polarization can be contagious, and a subpopulation facing economic hardship in an otherwise strong economy can tip the whole population into a state of polarization.

A key finding in our studies is that it really matters when redistributive policies are put in place. Redistribution functions far better as a prevention than a cure for polarization in part for the reason your question suggests: If polarization is already high, redistribution itself becomes the target of polarized attitudes.

Using “data from Amazon, 82.5 million reviews of 9.5 million products and category metadata from 1996-2014,” the authors determined which “product categories are most politically relevant, aligned and polarized.”

While the processes Zmigrod describes characterize the extremes, the electorate as a whole is moving farther and farther apart into two mutually loathing camps.

even small categories like automotive parts have notable political alignment indicative of lifestyle politics. These results indicate that lifestyle politics spread deep and wide across markets.

political psychologists dispute the argument that only “conservatism is associated with prejudice” and that “the types of dispositional characteristics associated with conservatism (e.g., low cognitive ability, low openness) explain this relationship.”

“when researchers use a more heterogeneous array of targets, people across the political spectrum express prejudice against groups with dissimilar values and beliefs.”

Earlier research has correctly found greater levels of prejudice among conservatives, they write, but these studies have focused on prejudice toward liberal-associated groups: minorities, the poor, gay people and other marginalized constituencies.

when the targets of prejudice are expanded to include “conservative-associated groups such as Christian fundamentalists, military personnel and ‘rich people,’” similar levels of prejudice emerge.

Caughey and his co-authors showa surprisingly close correspondence between mass and elite trends.

“people high in cognitive ability are prejudiced against more conservative and conventional groups,” while “people low in cognitive ability are prejudiced against more liberal and unconventional groups.”

he “rigidity-of-the-right hypotheses” should be expanded in recognition of the fact that “cognitive rigidity is linked to ideological extremism, partisanship and dogmatism across political and nonpolitical ideologies.”

“extreme right-wing partisans are characterized by specific psychological traits including cognitive rigidity and impulsivity. This is also true of extreme left-wing partisans.”

a clear inverted-U shaped curve emerged such that those on the extreme right and extreme left exhibited cognitive rigidity on neuropsychological tasks, in comparison to moderates.

“Low openness to experience is associated with prejudice against groups seen as socially unconventional (e.g., atheists, gay men and lesbians),” they write, whereas high openness is “associated with prejudice against groups seen as socially conventional (e.g., military personnel, evangelical Christians).

Analyzing these “pervasive lifestyle politics,” Ruch, Decter-Frain and Batra find that “cultural products are four times more polarized than any other segment.”

1) ideological divergence between Democrats and Republicans has widened dramatically within each domain, just as it has in Congress;

(2) ideological variation across senators’ partisan subconstituencies is now explained almost completely by party rather than state, closely tracking trends in the Senate

(3) economic, racial and social liberalism have become highly correlated across partisan subconstituencies, just as they have across members of Congress

Caughey, Dunham and Warshaw describe the growing partisan salience of racial and social issues since the 1950s:The explanatory power of party on racial issues increased hugely over this period and that of state correspondingly declined. We refer to this process as the “ideological nationalization” of partisan subconstituencies.

In the late 1950s, they continue,party explained almost no variance in racial conservatism in either arena. Over the next half century, the Senate and public time series rise in tandem.

Contrary to the claim that racial realignment had run its course by 1980, they add, “our data indicate that differences between the parties continued to widen through the end of the 20th century, in the Senate as well as in the mass public. By the 2000s, party explained about 80 percent of the variance in senators’ racial conservatism and nearly 100 percent of the variance in the mass public.

“it has limited the two parties’ abilities to tailor their positions to local conditions. Moreover, it has led to greater geographic concentration of the parties’ respective support coalitions.”

Today, across all offices, conservative states are largely dominated by Republicans, whereas the opposite is true of liberal states. The ideological nationalization of the party system thus seems to have undermined party competition at the state level.

this will continue to give ideological extremists an advantage in both parties’ primaries. It also means that the pool of people that run for office is increasingly extreme.

It will probably reduce partisans’ willingness to vote for the out-party. This could dampen voters’ willingness to hold candidates accountable for poor performance and to vote across party lines to select higher-quality candidates. This will probably further increase the importance of primaries as a mechanism for candidate selection.

Looking over the contemporary political landscape, there appear to be no major or effective movements to counter polarization.

As the McCoy-Press report shows, only 16 of the 52 countries that reached levels of pernicious polarization succeeded in achieving depolarization and in “a significant number of instances later repolarized to pernicious levels. The progress toward depolarization in seven of 16 episodes was later undone.”

That does not suggest a favorable prognosis for the United States.

A poll last week put the Pirates, who hang a black pirate flag in their parliamentary office, on nearly 21% of the vote, far short of the 40%-plus it was polling at the height of mass anti-government protests this spring,

The party has ruled out any possibility of forming a coalition with either of the current two ruling parties

“the parties forming a government … hiding behind compromises in coalition – enabling them to cheat voters again and again”.

nce the 2008 crash when Iceland’s three biggest banks collapsed owing 11 times the country’s GDP, Reykjavík’s stock market fell 97% and the value of the krona halved, Iceland has recovered economically.

Support for the Independence party, the Pirates’ rival for the position of largest party, seems to be holding.

Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the Pirates’ parliamentary leader, has said her party is willing to form a government with any party that subscribes to its agenda of “fundamental system change”, including the introduction of a new, crowdsourced national constitution.

the party advocates an “unlimited right” for citizens to be involved in political decision-making, with voters able to propose new legislation and decide on it in national referendums.

This election follows the resignation of Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur Davið Gunnlaugsson, who became the first major casualty of the Panama Papers

“Across Europe, increasingly many people think that the system that is supposed to look after them is not doing it any more,” Jónsdóttir said. “But we know we are new to this, and it is important that we are extra careful and extra critical on ourselves to not take too much on.”

Democratic and Republican Parties looked a lot different in 1952, when the American National Election Studies—surveys of voters conducted before and after presidential elections—were in their infancy. The Republicans, to some extent, were still regarded as the party of Lincoln, even though they had shifted their focus to courting southern white voters, causing black people to leave the party. Meanwhile, the Democrats were the party of a coalition that pushed for social services—the party of the New Deal. There were far fewer college-educated Americans at the time, but the white Americans who did have degrees tended to vote Republican, and those who didn't sided with the Democrats by a significant margin.

“The shift in whites without a college degree away from the Democratic Party begins as the Democratic Party becomes identified as the party of civil rights,” starting in the 1960s, Robby P. Jones, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, told me. Disaffected white southern Democrats, in particular, fled in droves.

in 2008, the election of Barack Obama, a black man, signaled that the Democrats were becoming the party of progressive racial politics. “Obama’s presidency simplifies the politics of race,” Michael Tesler, an associate professor of political science at UC Irvine, says. “If you were a low-educated white, you were much more likely to know about the partisan differences on race [after Obama] than you were before.”

In the 2016 election, 48 percent of college-educated white voters voted for Trump, compared with 66 percent of non-college-educated white voters. A Marist poll in October of this year found that 55 percent of non-college-educated white voters approved of the job Trump was doing, compared with just 39 percent of college-educated white voters.

Every year, on its American Values Survey, the Public Religion Research Institute asks Americans whether they “think American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the better, or has it mostly changed for the worse?” Fifty percent of Americans say that it’s gotten better in this year’s poll, and 47 percent say that it has gotten worse.

for white voters, the answer to that question is split by education level. Fifty-eight percent of college-educated whites this year say that America has gotten better since 1950, while 57 percent of non-college-educated whites say that it’s gotten worse

When President Trump says “Make America great again,” the again is instructive. He’s capitalizing on the nostalgia that non-college-educated white voters have for America’s past. “That harkening back to a supposed golden age where things were better has a really, really strong appeal for whites without a college degree,” Jones said.

David N. Smith, a professor at the University of Kansas, came to a similar conclusion when he and Eric Hanley took a dive into the 2016 American National Election Survey. They found that demographic data such as education are important predictors of which party someone votes for. But “when you bring the attitudes variables into account as well, what emerges is that attitudes loom even larger than demographics,” he told me.

When researchers control for voter attitudes on race in addition to white voters’ education level, Tesler says, the diploma divide disappears. No other factor, he says, explains the education gap as well—not economic anxiety, ideology, income, or gender.

That nostalgia, however, is for a time when black Americans and other minority groups had significantly fewer civil rights. And a Republican rhetoric that centers a longing for an era of white prosperity, rife with racist violence against black people, is why it’s impossible to understand the diploma divide without accounting for racial resentment

Here’s how he put it: If you look at white people who voted for Trump—both those with college degrees and those without—and identify everybody with a high level of resentment toward minorities, women, and Muslims, as well as those who want an arrogant, assertive leader, there’s almost no one left. The vast majority of Trump voters share those sentiments, the researchers found, regardless of education level

“Trump’s conquest of the Republican Party is complete, and the former ‘fringe’ has become so thoroughly intertwined with the ‘establishment’ that the two are virtually indistinguishable.”

The growing diploma divide is less a result of non-college-educated white voters becoming Republicans, and more of college-educated white voters finding that they can’t fully support the party anymore. “What's happened since 2016 is that the low-educated whites have kind of plateaued in their support for the Republicans,” Tesler says. “But you've seen this trend increase [of] high-educated whites [moving] towards the Democrats.”

Over time, those who supported Ted Cruz, who called Trump a “sniveling coward” during the campaign, and those who supported Marco Rubio, who called him a “con man,” tended to come around to Trump.

the voters that stand out, Smith said, are those who initially supported John Kasich. “They, in many instances, agree with Trump on policy issues, but the best data indicates that they are uncomfortable with him personally,” he said. “There are key aspects of his rhetorical style, of his governing style, that they don't like.”

Hidden in that gap is a threat to higher education itself. Last year, Pew issued a sobering survey. “Republicans have soured on higher education,” the survey declared, and it threw people into a frenzy.

Sixty-seven percent of Republicans, the survey found, had “some” to “little” confidence in colleges as institutions. A number of factors contribute to this distrust, the rising cost of tuition and the perception of a liberal bent at colleges among them. And if one major party believes that higher education is an engine of liberal indoctrination

Decades of funding cuts by state governments have already hit the institutions hard. And these cuts, in turn, have driven an increase in tuition costs and more animosity toward higher education. As Michael Grunwald recently wrote in Politico, “The next big Republican culture war will be a war on college.”

But this attempt to cater to the average voter came at a cost. The party soon found itself deprived of many of its usual supporters, who took a different course, downplaying the danger and castigating the government. On Facebook and social media, the party stuttered.

As the first lockdown was tentatively lifted, through April and May, many leading AfD figures performed a 180-degree turn. No longer consensual, they fiercely railed against restrictions of any kind, which they claimed were unconstitutional as well as economically ruinous.

In November, to demonstrate its defiance, the party held an in-person convention with hundreds of participants packed into a hall. That same month, an AfD legislator appeared in the parliament, where masks are mandatory, wearing one riddled with holes. And prominent party members not only attended some of the anti-lockdown protests that spread across the country last year but also adopted the protesters’ talking points, for example by calling Germany a “Corona dictatorship.” The AfD became something like the anti-lockdown party.

The move made sense. By the time the pandemic arrived, the party “had started to struggle,” Kai Arzheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Mainz, told me. Migration had vanished from the top of voters’ concerns, depriving the party of its momentum. It was unclear how it might make further inroads.

What’s more, the party was increasingly seen as extreme and radical. The media uncovered many ties to extremist groups

The historic showing of 2017 — when the AfD became the first far-right party to enter Germany’s postwar parliament — is unlikely to be repeated, let alone surpassed.

That doesn’t make the party less of a danger, though. In ways reminiscent of former President Donald Trump, the AfD is seeking to scuttle public trust in the political system.

Ahead of an election where many may vote remotely — Germany’s vaccination program probably won’t be complete by fall — this amounts to a calculated strategy of subversion. Though the party’s influence is limited, the fact that 8 percent to 10 percent of the electorate seems unshakable in its support is deeply concerning.

Trump continues claiming — without evidence — that there was widespread fraud in the election, a claim that has been rejected by courts in 60 lawsuits.

If a desire to empower Republican members of Congress and the Republican vice president to disregard the election and select the next president sounds authoritarian, it's because it is, in the purest sense of the word.

Parties evolve. A key moment in the Democratic Party's shift from the party of the Confederacy to the party that embraces racial diversity was President Lyndon B. Johnson signing of the Civil Rights Act.

A key moment in the Republican Party's shift from the party of Lincoln to the party that includes the Proud Boys and white nationalists was the so-called Southern strategy, an appeal to rural white Southerners using racially charged wedge issues like affirmative action.

And now, another shift is occurring as numerous Republican leaders reject the democratic process.

Authoritarianism has a great deal of appeal. There is no gridlock and no need to compromise. Change can happen quickly. It promises unlimited power and wealth to the ruling group.

Now, as a result of the current political shift, a not insignificant number of those who embrace traditional conservative values feel they have no place in the Republican Party — which is why prominent conservatives like former Reps. Paul Mitchell, David Jolly and Joe Walsh, George Will, William Kristol, Jennifer Rubin and Michael Steele have either left the party or supported Democratic candidates in the 2020 election.

Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."

Clinton was referring to the GOP grooming Gabbard, not Russians.

Gabbard reacted by tweeting that Clinton is “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that sickened the Democratic Party for so long."

Trump attacked Clinton for the suggestion earlier this week, and said Clinton and other Democrats claim everyone opposed to them is a Russian agent.

ratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday that she will not run for re-election for her U.S. representative seat, saying she wants to focus on trying to secure her party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump.Gabbard, who represents Hawaii, made the announcement in a video and email to supporters."I believe that I can best serve the people of Hawaii and our country as your president and commander-in-chief," Gabbard said in the video.Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.Sign UpThis site is protected by recaptcha Privacy Policy | Terms of Service She also expressed gratitude to the people of Hawaii for her nearly seven years in Congress.In January, Hawaii state Sen. Kai Kahele, a Democrat, said he would run for Gabbard's seat, NBC affiliate KHNL of Honolulu reported.An Iowa Democratic caucus poll out this week put Gabbard at 3 percent, with former Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the top three spots.She is in a crowded field of Democrats seeking the nomination to run for president. Another candidate, U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, ended his long-shot presidential campaign Thursday.RecommendedvideovideoMcConnell: If the House impeaches Trump, Senate will hold trial 'until we finish'2020 Election2020 ElectionTim Ryan drops out of presidential raceHillary Clinton recently suggested that she believed Republicans were grooming one of the Democrats for a third-party candidacy. Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."

Llompart said she'll split her ballot. For governor, she's supporting the candidate who supports Puerto Rico's independence from the United States, and for downticket offices she'll support candidates from a new party, Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana — or Citizens' Victory Movement — that's emerging as the first substantial challenge in decades to the island's two-party system.

Though polling indicates that one of the two traditional party candidates will win, the numbers also suggest it could be with support from less than 40% of the electorate, the smallest vote share ever to propel a Puerto Rican governor to office.

The island's youngest voters have come of age during a recession that has driven an exodus of half-a-million people — largely young adults — to the mainland United States. The past four years alone have arguably been the most tumultuous in Puerto Rico's modern history. It has declared bankruptcy, lost control of its own finances to a federal board appointed to resolve its debt, faced massive cuts to education and pensions, muddled through the recovery from two major hurricanes, faced earthquakes, corruption scandals, and a pandemic.

"We're exhausted," Lebrón said.

Lebrón said it's that same energy driving the unprecedented political realignment that appears to be taking hold this year, as more voters demand a move away from the two-party system they believe has prioritized the statehood question while sidelining the needs of everyday Puerto Ricans.

"Not in this election, but maybe in 2024, or 2028, because the numbers in the younger demographic with these two old parties are very, very weak."

Alexandra Lúgaro, the Citizens' Victory gubernatorial candidate – is considered a longshot to win, but if candidates from her party earn seats in the legislature or at the municipal level, it could build momentum that carries the party to stronger showings in future elections.

Both parties' candidates are polling around 10 to 12%, and have similar policy priorities, though the pro-independence party has historically made the island's independence from the United States a central tenet of its platform.

Tuesday's election will also include a non-binding referendum asking Puerto Ricans whether they support statehood, and two additional minor candidates for the governorship.

DeLeón believes Victoria Ciudadana has a better chance of siphoning support away from the traditional pro- and anti-statehood parties that he feels have driven Puerto Rico's economy into the ground.

Surveys routinely show that Black Americans are scattered across the ideological spectrum despite overwhelmingly voting for Democrats. Gallup data for last year showed that just over two in five Black Americans identify as moderate and that roughly a quarter each identify as liberal or conservative

An enduring unity at the ballot box is not confirmation that Black voters hold the same views on every contested issue, but rather that they hold the same view on the one most consequential issue: racial equality.

The existence of the Black electoral monolith is evidence of a critical defect not in Black America, but in the American practice of democracy. That defect is the space our two-party system makes for racial intolerance and the appetite our electoral politics has for the exploitation of racial polarization — to which the electoral solidarity of Black voters is an immune response.

To be Black in America has often meant to act in political solidarity with other Black people. Sometimes those politics have been formal and electoral, sometimes they have been of protest and revolt. But they have always, by necessity, been existential and utilitarian.

A recognition that achieving racial equality required a strong government fueled Black progressivism, which demanded anti-lynching federal legislation; eradication of the poll tax and other barriers to voting; and expansion of quality public education

The ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments codified freedmen’s participation in the electoral process at a time when upward of 90 percent of Black Americans lived in the Southern states, constituting actual or near majorities in more than a few.

This was the Black monolith’s forceful debut. In a thriving democracy, one aligned to the nation’s professed values, a competition for these new voters would have ensued. The monolith would have dissipated as individual Black voters sought out their ideological compatriots instead of being compelled to band against segregation and racial violence.

In the first century of American politics, the word “compromise” — Three-Fifths, Missouri, 1850, 1877 — was often a euphemism for prying natural and constitutional rights from Black Americans’ grip.

These political arrangements underscored the paradox that plagued Black America from the outset: The same federalist government charged with the delivery and defense of constitutional rights was often the means of denying them. On matters of race, the state was at once dangerously unreliable and positively indispensable.

The contours of Black politics were shaped by this quandary. The lack of faith in American democracy’s ability to do what was right undergirded Black conservatism, producing economic philosophies like Booker T. Washington’s bootstrapping self-determination; social efforts toward civic acceptance like the respectability politics of the Black church; and separatist politics like the early iterations of black nationalism.

When Black men were first enfranchised after the end of the Civil War, they faced a partisan politics reduced to one stark choice: Side with those who would extend more rights of citizenship to Black people or with those who would deny them.

Truman’s decision to sign executive orders desegregating the military and the federal work force was an electoral broadside constructed, in part, to help win over the support of northern Black voters.

The Democrats’ and Republicans’ national platforms in this period often addressed civil rights in nearly equal measure, and sometimes Republicans were more progressive on the question.

President Dwight Eisenhower declared in the 1950s that racial segregation harmed the nation’s security interests.

Richard Nixon held positions on civil rights similar to John F. Kennedy’s during the 1960 presidential campaign, and won nearly a third of the Black vote that yea

Stumping for Nixon in 1960, Senator Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican, declared that “there’s hardly enough difference between Republican conservatives and the Southern Democrats to put a piece of paper between.” When Goldwater became the 1964 Republican presidential nominee and voiced his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, Black voters bunched themselves into the Democratic Party for good, supporting Lyndon Johnson at a rate comparable with Barack Obama’s nearly a half-century later.

Within a decade, white Southern Democrats were responding favorably to the appeals of the Republican Party. Richard Nixon’s “law and order” refrain and Ronald Reagan’s renewed call for “states’ rights” were racialized, implicitly communicating opposition to progressive policies like busing and tapping into anxieties about a rapidly integrating society.

With explicitly racist appeals now socially taboo, symbolic and ostensibly colorblind gestures made the transition easier by reframing the race question as one about free-market principles, personal responsibility and government nonintervention.

Racial segregation could be achieved without openly championing it; the social hierarchy maintained without evangelizing it. American voters, Black and white alike, got the message.

The result was that racial polarization was now less a product of partisan philosophies about the personhood or citizenship of Black Americans and more a fact of partisan identity — and a political instrument to hold and wield power.

This was a subtle but profound shift, and a dangerous one. As the University of Maryland professor Lilliana Mason writes in her 2018 book, “Uncivil Agreement,” “Partisan, ideological, religious and racial identities have, in recent decades, moved into strong alignment, or have become ‘sorted,’” such that partisan attacks can become race-based, personal and unmoored from policy disputes.

Partisan energy accordingly is hardly ever expended in an earnest competition for Black voters but rather in determining whether they can vote, tilting the axis of the issue away from the exercise of the franchise to access to it.

Racial identity has now become fully entangled with partisanship: The Republican Party is attracting more white voters while people of color are massing in the Democratic Party.

Not only does race now split the parties more cleanly than ever, but the racial gap exacerbates partisan polarization.

In “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop,” the political scientist Lee Drutman notes that the modern American two-party system so consecrates competition that party leaders are more incentivized to disparage the other side as extreme and un-American than to compromise.

Deliberation is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy. A people that does not seriously deliberate about its nation and its leaders is a people ill suited to the task of providing the consent from which government derives its power.

For Black voters, agency and political freedom are luxuries they have never fully enjoyed.

It didn’t have to be this way. There have been moments in history in which better leaders and better people would have competed for Black America’s increasing electoral power instead of organizing against it.

or a nation deeply divided on race relations, the easy and more politically expedient strategy has always won out.

For our democracy to reach its final form, the answer cannot be that one party has tried to answer the call — it must be that each party does so and without penalty.

A young John Lewis made this argument in 1963 at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. In his impassioned speech, he channeled the frustrations of Black America and excoriated the nation’s partisan democracy for posturing on race relations instead of taking revolutionary action to realize the promise of America.

“Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on Washington? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march in the streets of Birmingham?”

this hides some important lessons about the two political parties and their association with the “liberal” and “conservative” political traditions, and why our political polarization so dangerous for American democracy.

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to avoid confusion, I’ll refer to the “liberal” political movement in the United States as “the Left,” while using “liberal” for the political philosophical tradition; likewise, “the Right” and “conservative.”

The Left and liberal are not the same thing, and neither are the Right and conservative