All of these tendencies contribute to our political woes. Donald Trump makes all of them worse. But the dynamics go beyond the president and his administration. They’re unfolding according to their own logic — a logic that will remain at work even after the current occupant of the White House is gone.

That logic is producing a form of politics that can best be described by borrowing a line from conservative philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre: Politics has become a “civil war carried on by other means.” As in a civil war, political conflict now takes the form of a battle to the figurative death. Justice has been reduced to the friend/enemy distinction: Whatever damage is done to the other side in the name of progress for my own mission is acceptable, even laudable.

In such a world, all political disagreement begins to look like zero-sum conflict in which mutually beneficial outcomes are impossible. Each party is either a winner or a loser, and compromise is impossible. The very notion of a politics of principle vanishes, with all appeals to higher loyalties increasingly dismissed as a cover for lower, more self-interested motives. All that matters is victory for one’s own side or faction.