In 2018, Yuval Levin declared that “our country is badly in need of renewal. And given our strengths and weaknesses just now, such renewal certainly seems more likely to start at the bottom. This is a time to go local.” Levin was right in 2018, and events since — from Covid to George Floyd and January 6 — have only highlighted the need for renewal in 2022, calling to mind more extreme words: recovery, restoration, even rescue.
Whichever of these descriptions one prefers, the national and state governments are as unlikely agents to bring it about now as they were then. One reason for this is party politics. Political parties exist to win elections. The winner-take-all, single-member-district system of elections that prevails across almost all the United States means that only two parties can consistently compete at the national level. Winning elections on such a large scale means communicating to astronomically high numbers of voters, and that requires each party to present its positions in as clear, simplistic, and distinct a manner as possible. The two-party system doesn’t necessarily create polarization, but it encourages and nourishes it. Once political polarization exists among voters, it is in the interest of both political parties to sustain it.
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