The political parties have been utterly complicit in the process. Exploiting social media and other technologies, Republicans and Democrats shape their messages around the assumption that they — and they alone — have legitimate ownership of America’s authentic best self. That’s why whichever party is out of power promises to “take back America” — as if the other side were foreign invaders.
Barack Obama was elected in 2008 in no small part to fulfill the promise of his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address: to banish the slicing and dicing of America into Red States and Blue States.
The colors of the electoral map may have been smudged and scrambled over the last eight years, but the underlying polarization Obama inherited from George W. Bush only intensified on his watch. Trump will be the third president in a row to promise to unite the country, and he will almost certainly be the third in a row to fail.
The ugly squabble between the president-elect and Representative John Lewis (D., Ga.) over the weekend offers a glimpse into how bad things will get.
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