[Editor’s Note: This article has been adapted from Sarah Longwell’s new book, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time, which lays out the definitive playbook for how Democrats can beat the MAGA movement and reverse the country’s slide into authoritarianism.]
THERE ARE A MILLION FACTORS contributing to Americans’ decisions to sort themselves, en masse, into two highly polarized factions perpetually at war with one another: geographic sorting, education stratification, big institutional failures that shattered the public’s trust, bewildering technological changes, the loss of those “little platoons” that Edmund Burke wrote about that were once so influential in binding us together.
