(2023-10-05) Americas Political Turmoil

America’s Political Turmoil. Imagine if you were a foreign leader surveying the political chaos in the United States:

If you were an ally of the U.S., you’d have to be worried. If you were an enemy, you’d have to be pleased.

Many factors have contributed to this turmoil. Decades of stagnant living standards have caused voter frustration. Social media, along with the rise of a cable television network willing to promote falsehoods, has inflamed discourse. The decline of institutions — churches, labor unions, once-dominant local employers — has left Americans feeling unmoored

But the single largest source of the chaos is the Republican Party.

I think there is plenty of evidence that the Democratic Party also has problems

the Democrats remain a functional party by almost any standard

The Republican Party, by contrast, is both fractured and increasingly extreme. Tens of millions of Republican voters have embraced beliefs that are simply wrong: that Obama was born in Kenya, that Donald Trump was cheated out of re-election, that Covid vaccines don’t work, that human beings aren’t causing climate change.

Kevin McCarthy’s downfall as speaker is the latest sign of the party’s drift toward radicalism.

When my colleagues and I asked democracy experts this week how to make sense of the country’s political turmoil, they emphasized that the central explanation was the Republican Party: 2023-10-06-WhyDoRepublicansKeepDestroyingTheirOwnLeaders

Daniel Ziblatt, a co-author of the recent book “Tyranny of the Minority,” told me that the structure of the American political system was partly to blame: The Electoral College, the Senate and gerrymandering have allowed Republicans to wield power without appealing to most Americans.