Democratic strength is now concentrated in fewer but more heavily populated areas. Polarization has intensified as voters in over half the nation’s counties cast landslide margins for one presidential candidate or the other. These tendencies are intensifying and have spilled over to Congressional elections, leading to legislative paralysis. Self-perpetuating clusters of the like-minded lead voters and their representatives away from the center.

It isn’t just that it’s getting harder to compromise — or that a lack of compromise is what many voters want — but that the topics that divide us are among the most difficult on which to achieve consensus: matters of personal intimacy – not only sex, love and children, but freedom and individual autonomy. This has not always been the stuff of politics; it is now.

Political commitments are molded by a wide-ranging array of forces from economic security to the type of job a voter holds to his or her place in a status hierarchy or a community. This complexity, and the built-in potential for new fissures, means that any political coalition — whether it’s constructed on the model of a big tent or of a working partnership — is inherently fragile. How well equipped is the Democratic party to smooth over differences between its wealthiest and its poorest supporters, its most culturally liberal and its most culturally traditional voters? Does the Republican Party have the ability to fracture this new Democratic coalition?