Over the last few decades in America, partisanship has become a type of personal identity. A political party is more than an organization or the letter next to a candidate's name on a ballot. This is about much more than "political polarization" or "hyper-partisanship" or the other sterile technical language which experts routinely use in academia, the news media, and the larger political class. In today's America, party identification reflects fundamental debates and divides over what it means to be a citizen, a member of a political community and a human being.
Two concepts are particularly useful for understanding this broken politics and the larger democracy crisis:
