A few additional thoughts on this characteristically great @michelleinbklyn column...
nytimes.com/2021/11/22/opi…
nytimes.com/2021/11/22/opi…
Speaking for myself the root of The Bad Feeling has to do with the tension between the normal dynamics of a competitive two-party democracy, with the growing anti-democratic politics of one of those two parties.
Basically, in a two-party democracy you expect the two coalitions to trade power back and forth, to share it between branches and levels of government and to have lots of fights/conflicts all the time. That's politics. One party isn't gonna win all the time.
Right now, though, one of those coalitions is controlled by a faction that is quite explicitly and aggressively radicalizing against democracy (and increasingly flirting with violence). That radicalizing hasn't really had any effect on their political viability or chance at power
And so now the "normal" back and forth of politics (the "out" party mobilizes and does well in off-year elections, thermostatic public opinion, etc) seems exisentially perilous in a way it hasn't before.
I hope I'm wrong about how perilous this all is. I could be! Or maybe something happens to break this very unstable quasi-equilibrium, but right now it's hard not to be pretty worried!
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