Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
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media—is neatly lined up in the red or
the blue column. Political scientists
continue to debate how much o this is
true ideological polarization, in which
partisan disagreements reÁect funda-
mentally dierent values and world-
views, and how much o it is merely an
increased alignment o partisanship with
other divides in an ever more diverse
and unequal society. But this debate is
secondary to the basic change. Once,
many cultural, racial, ethnic, and geo-
graphic divides cut across parties. Today,
it is partisanship all the way down.
In this transformed context, previ-
ously muted weaknesses o the American
system are coming to the fore: the
opportunities for self-aggrandizement by
a president unconstrained by norms o
restraint or by the other branches o
government; the lack o a clear, circum-
scribed role for the federal courts, which
are now Ãlling up with partisan judges
armed with lifetime appointments; the
politicization o a late-to-develop admin-
istrative state; the endless opportunities
for obstruction in a bicameral legislature;
the huge tilt o the Senate toward rural
states. Although state and city govern-
ments often have greater freedom to act,
intense partisanship at those levels and
gridlock at the federal level are pushing
them, too, toward more polarized and less
eective governance. The laboratories
o democracy have become laboratories o
division, testing grounds for policy
approaches, electoral maps, and voting
rules explicitly designed to cripple one
side o the partisan Ãght.
In short, the U.S. political system
still requires compromise but no longer
facilitates it. On the contrary, it is
generating a doom loop o polarization
as partisan forces run up against institu-wealth toward those at the very top o
the economic pyramid. It has also
concentrated growth in cities and sucked
it out o rural areas and small towns
Yet even as yawning inequality has
made structural reform more pressing,
many white Americans have seen the
United States’ inevitable march toward
a majority-minority society as an even
greater threat.
American political institutions have
always posed diculties for those
seeking to tackle problems like these.
The U.S. system o checks and balances,
with its separate branches and levels
o government, requires a high level o
compromise to function. Historically,
the system also facilitated compromise
because its frictions and fragmenta-
tion—famously celebrated by James
Madison at its birth—encouraged a
proliferation o interests and perspec-
tives rather than the emergence o a
single dominant cleavage. With rare and
unpleasant exceptions, as in the run-up
to the Civil War, the two major parties
featured internal divides large enough
to permit cross-party bargaining.
Durable coalitions even emerged from
time to time that transcended the main
party divide. These crosscutting cleav-
ages allowed public ocials to overcome
the system’s tendencies toward gridlock
and confront (albeit often incompletely
and haltingly) many o the biggest
challenges the nation faced. That process
transformed the United States into one o
the richest, healthiest, and best-educated
societies the world has ever seen.
No longer. Almost every element o
today’s political systemÏfrom electoral
jurisdictions to economic regions, from
public ocials to advocacy organiza-
tions, from the mass public to the mass