“The main divide in American politics today isn’t between liberals and conservatives or left and right. It’s between those who believe in the system and those who don’t.” 

Here is Shadi Hmid at The Washington Post:

The main divide in American politics today isn’t between liberals and conservatives or left and right. It’s between those who believe in the system and those who don’t. And sometimes it really does feel like a matter of belief. It’s a visceral divide about whether basic institutions of American life — from the federal bureaucracy and financial markets to academia and the mainstream media — are working or broken. But it’s more than a feeling, and it’s not entirely new.

The first Trump administration had already scrambled political identities. With Donald Trump’s call to make America great again, Democrats were forced to insist that America was already great. What else could they really say? After eight years of an Obama presidency that most Democrats were proud of, conceding that something had gone wrong would have been an admission of guilt.

With the election of Joe Biden, this growing gap in perspective solidified. For a minority of Americans — mostly left-leaning college-educated professionals — the system was working. And for the richest and most wealthy among us, too. In under 10 years, America experienced a profound shift in partisan allegiance, in which class divides were turned upside down. From 1948 until 2012, the top 5 percent of White income earners were the most likely to vote Republican. Then the pattern reversed almost entirely. By 2020, the top 5 percent became the least likely to vote Republican.

The status quo may not have been perfect, but it was good enough. Revolution wasn’t the answer; reform was. Institutions were worth conserving — and even more so because Trump made it a habit to attack and undermine them.

Whenever I say “status quo,” I might as well be saying a bad word. And that’s the problem: Democrats became associated with something that most of us bristle against instinctually. American society has always been a society in motion, either progressing or regressing but always moving. The status quo is antithetical to movement. Yet the Democratic Party found itself in an odd position: the party of precisely that — the status quo. The party of the system. The party of institutions (that people didn’t particularly like). The party of the establishment. And, yes, the party of privilege.

Such a transformation would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago, when Democrats championed working-class interests against corporate power — the party of the little man against, well, the man. This inversion offered Republicans an opening. As implausible as it may have seemed, they became the party of resistance and rebellion, the party that railed against a status quo that most Americans agreed wasn’t serving their interests.

Read the rest here.