@eirrann.eth

I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I won't argue with @b05 about whether my thinking somehow helps to drive a GOP narrative. I respectfully disagree with the idea that any criticism of the Democrats is tacit support for the Republicans. I think it's important to push back against arguments that I feel conflate structural critique with moral equivalence. I am not arguing that there are no major differences between the Democratic and Republican parties today. There plainly are. The Trump administration represents a clear and present danger to constitutional order, democratic norms, and the basic rights of both citizens and non-citizens. Anyone pretending otherwise is not engaging seriously with reality. I also don’t believe Sam Rosenfeld would deny that if he were writing The Polarizers today. What I am arguing is narrower, and more structural. For decades now, the Democratic Party has repeatedly failed to act as an effective institutional counterweight to Republican power-seeking that increasingly disregards democratic norms. The clearest inflection point for many of us was the party’s weak-wristed failure to assert its constitutional authority during McConnell’s blockade of Obama’s Supreme Court nominee: but that abdication long predates Trump. Again and again, Democrats have responded to norm-breaking with proceduralism, deference and hope that the system will self-correct. That failure matters. It matters because it created the conditions in which Trumpism could flourish. It matters because the absence of a credible, forceful opposition helped normalize tactics that were once unthinkable. In that sense, Democratic institutional weakness has enabled Trump’s excesses just as surely as Republican complicity and cowardice have. Rosenfeld’s key insight is not that the parties are “the same”, but that beneath their real and consequential differences on social and cultural issues, they are structurally similar enough on core questions of governance that polarization becomes the primary tool for maintaining power. When neither party can – or will – deliver durable material improvements or meaningful institutional reform, they are incentivized to keep voters locked in perpetual conflict over wedge issues, election cycle after election cycle. That does not erase differences. It explains why those differences are constantly weaponized. And this is where I part ways with the idea that calling this out somehow “helps Republicans”. In fact, the opposite may be true. Refusing to interrogate Democratic failures because Republicans are worse leaves us trapped with a binary that is increasingly incapable of meeting the moment. The result is a system where one party is openly hostile to democracy, and the other is chronically incapable of defending it. We need more than these two options. What Rosenfeld gets right – and what still feels painfully relevant – is that the duopoly’s grip on power depends on keeping us in constant, existential conflict over wedges. This is precisely because the underlying institutional and economic order remains largely intact no matter who wins. Until that changes, the cycle will continue, and each iteration will be more dangerous than the last. That is not “both sides”. That is a warning about structural failure.

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