Rest easy: there isn’t going to be any civil war. (I almost typed “silly war” there.) Yeah, if you read a lot of political blogs, they can make you think dark thoughts about the future. However, there’s a world’s worth of difference between venting on an anonymous blog and shouldering a rifle to go out to kill and be killed. The vast majority of Americans aren’t political junkies. There are millions of Red voters in Blue States, and millions of Blue voters in Red States. If you told every American to take a truth serum and then reveal his/her political opinion, she/he would be surprised to find so many friends in the opposite political camp, and so many adversaries in their own.

in his roman a clef, the leader of the independence forces was a woman,

I do agree with DCL that Trump isn’t really a conservative, which is why I support DeSantis. What I wonder is, when I look at the UK from the US, is whether there are any genuine conservatives over there.

OMG…that statement is so funny, and so ludicrous. Obviously, you don’t live here and have witnessed over the past 3 years how the Biden administration has totally shredded the Constitution and the rule of law. Under presidential fiat, number one example is the open southern border where by the Constitution the President must uphold all the immigration laws. Instead, they have gutted all those laws. The list continues from there down to their fiats on what stoves we can buy. Constitution?? As far as the Biden administration is concerned there is no Constitution; we are far beyond what you claim Trump would do…as I said your statement is ironically laughable. Go back and look at Trump’s first term and cite for me the numerous examples of presidential power grabbing compared to the last 3 years….you can’t do it.

Oh, BTW, if you think Biden is actually in charge from your view across the pond, I hate to tell you he is nothing more than a convenient puppet for the far left cabal. Just watch his doddering dementia to get the point. Most likely this is Obama’s shadow third term.

That is a lot of interesting stuff to think about. I didn’t realise the polarisation was so long term. It makes me wonder how much is down to the electoral system although you would expect that to create greater focus on swing voters.

My feeling in the UK is parties do well when they straddle the middle. A mix of social conservatism, economic liberalism and effective running of state services and institutions. Fail on more than one of those and you won’t get elected. Pretty much the model followed here by Margaret Thatcher. It pushes parties to the centre – where Labour is heading, as the extremes lose, as Labour have repeatedly proved and the Conservatives are about to experience.

Is increased US partisanship due to the change in Media? A more partisan broadcast and print media plus social media leaving voters in their own echo chambers. That’s been suggested in the UK although I am not that convinced.

And the question remains of how do you pull a country together? Does the US want to remain a single powerful federal nation or become something else? Do states like California and Florida have anything in common? Is there any reason to stick together.

And then there is the Trump factor. Like most Brits I just don’t see the appeal and certainly don’t see him as a Conservative. But he obviously pulls in voters. We had a slightly similar character in Boris Johnson but it really didn’t take long for his act to fall apart. Plus he took a more self effacing approach as the bombastic egotistical Trump shtick just wouldn’t work here.

My fear is that Trumps route to success is to create more division, to seek to enrage not only his opponents but his supporters as well. He must be delighted with all the court room appearances as it plays right into his hands. Once he is elected, and I do think he will win as Biden is woeful, you will see some very rapid changes to the US State and Constitution – mainly in the power of the President – as well as global influence.

Good luck to all of you whatever happens but I do hope you find more ways to talk across the aisles.

Suffice it to say that DW-Nominate doesn’t really capture the ideological movement of the party (right or left). Yesterday, Philip Bump looked at this and, to his credit, admitted there are problems with using DW-Nominate scores to measure something like this.

There are a lot of valid criticisms of DW-NOMINATE in general that we could examine, but it’s not a great measure of what Musk is talking about anyway. Instead, let’s consider how Americans actually identify their own politics. Luckily, we have a metric for that: evaluations of ideology as measured in the biennial General Social Survey (GSS). The survey asks people to score their identity on a scale from one (extremely liberal) to seven (extremely conservative). In the middle is four, moderate.

Here’s how members of each party (including those who identify themselves as “strong” partisans) have rated their ideology on average since 2002.
…
What you’ll notice is that Democrats and strong Democrats have, in fact, gotten more liberal — but that Republicans and strong Republicans were far more polarized in the first place.

…
The NY Times looked at a similar chart put together by a group called the Manifesto Project back in 2019. Again, it showed the GOP was further right that most right-wing parties worldwide and placed the Democrats just left of the median. However, when looked at over time the story noted US Democrats were moving left:
…
Similar to the data Philip Bump looked at, this suggests the US started with a center of gravity further to the right but that recently the left has been pushing substantially to the left. And if you once again imagine someone who is pretty close to the left on policy circa 2008, that person is closer to the right in 2016.

Of course there are plenty of objections you could make about this chart as well. Does the language of political platforms really capture where the party is at in any meaningful way? My point is only that there is some data that sort of backs up the idea behind Musk’s meme, i.e. that some people who considered themselves basically on the left might now feel the party has moved away from them.

One of Sexton’s references, from Morris’s thread, also by Bump a few years previously:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/08/new-era-democratic-politics-one-graph/

In its surveys conducted over the course of 1994, about half of Democrats identified themselves as moderates — while as many identified as conservative as did liberal. This was the year in which Republicans retook the House in dramatic fashion; well over half of the party told Gallup that they, too, were conservatives.

Since then, though, there’s been a steady shift on the left. In every single year save one, Gallup’s polling has found the percentage of Democrats who identify as liberal has either increased or stayed the same. In its most recent poll, released Tuesday, a new benchmark was set: More than half of Democrats now identify as liberals. By comparison, only about 1 in 8 identify as conservative.
…
In 2017, the Pew Research Center found a widening gulf between Democrats and Republicans on a number of political issues over the same period — a widening gulf that revealed partisanship as the biggest indicator of political differences.
…
On a number of issues included in Pew’s research, the movement among Democrats was more significant than that among Republicans.
…
That Trumpist shift is also visible in the first graph above. A party that was two-thirds conservative in 1994 is now three-quarters conservative. As is also the case with “liberal,” that term also means something different from what it meant 25 years ago.