America is a broken political family. On the ground, this means that Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, do not live in the same neighborhoods or belong to the same organizations. They do not pray or worship together. They do not date or marry each other. They are not friends. Technical terms like “negative partisanship” and “polarization” are just fancy ways of saying that the American people do not like each other very much right now.
In America’s political imagination, Democrats live in big cities, are racially and ethnically diverse, and college-educated. Republicans live in rural America and are working class. Red State America has been fully MAGA-fied; big cities and blue states are dominated by “out of touch liberals,” “the radical left” and “wokeness.”
