Ultimately, the more binary the party system, the stronger the out-party hatred. But there is also something particular about what’s happening in the U.S., even compared to other majoritarian(ish) democracies. For example, the major parties on the right in Canada and Australia have not become as illiberal as their American counterpart. Canadian politics scholars would point out that in Canada, regional identities are often stronger than national partisan identities, and this regionalism has kept Canadian politics more moderate. And Australian scholars would point out that ranked-choice voting has exerted a moderating force on Australian politics. In the U.S., meanwhile, (and to some extent the U.K.), politics have become extremely nationalized. Cities became more socially liberal, multiracial and cosmopolitan, most of the rest of the country held onto more traditional values and stayed predominantly white, and suburbs turned into the political battleground. And as Rodden explains in “Why Cities Lose,” parties with rural strongholds often wind up with disproportionate electoral power, since their opposition tends to over-concentrate its vote in lopsided districts. This rural bias is especially pronounced in the U.S. Senate, for instance. But while it’s true that cultural values have emerged as a more important organizing conflict across advanced democracies (one compelling explanation is that following the collapse of Communism and the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, parties of the left and right converged on support for market economics), the urban-rural split in countries with more proportional voting systems is far less binary. That’s in large part because in proportional democracies, multiple parties can still win seats in geographically unfriendly areas, with coalition governments including some balance of both urban and rural representation.2