According to exit polls, Tuesday’s vote continued a trend, reaching a record low percentage of self-described liberals who voted for Republican candidates for the House of Representatives, and a record low percentage of conservatives who voted for Democratic candidates. Ideology is slowly becoming rigidly prescriptive and political transcendence is becoming less and less possible or admirable…

Instead of moving toward the middle, we are drifting toward the extremes.

We need only flip on cable “news” in the evenings to see how this plays out. We are feted to a cacophony of recriminations and a never-ending string of gotcha moments, until the “other side” has been stripped of all nobility. The Anchors of Acrimony have made a fortune salting the middle ground. So now the political pendulum has swung back hard to the right, mostly because of a disproportionately large number of older, wealthier, conservative voters — a quirk of midterms in general but particularly strong this cycle. It was yet another ideological backlash…

That ripping sound you hear is the fabric of a nation.