II. The Collapse of the Political Center

The collapse of the political center is a well-known but poorly understood development in American politics over the last four decades. It is well known because everyone knows that “moderates” in elected office have disappeared. But it is poorly understood because few people have a compelling explanation for why it happened, and even fewer understand why there was moderation to begin with. Most common explanations focus on epiphenomena of the changes, such as changes in the culture of Washington, or the failure of individual members to get to know each other's families and spend time together as people. But these changes are downstream from the simple fact that in an earlier era, the parties were overlapping coalitions in which considerable bipartisanship emerged from the fact that many representatives and senators held shared views that crossed party lines, and the parties were so ideologically diverse and heterogeneous that it was impossible for any one person to impose a “party line.”

The simplest way to understand this transformation is that we went from something more like a four-party system (with liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats alongside liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans) into a two-party system (with just liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans). In the four-party system, coalitions were flexible, issue-dependent, and thus multi-dimensional, with few permanent enemies and many possible allies on all issues. In the two-party system, there were only two coalitions, locked in a zero-sum struggle along a single “us-vs-them” dimension.

In essence, the American two-party system is now the purest version of itself, a two-party system in which the two parties are distinct, non-overlapping coalitions that offer extremely distinct alternatives to the American people. However, contrary to expectations of a previous generation of political scientists who lauded this as a vision of “responsible party government,”¹ the reality is that the pure two-party system has been a disaster. It has been a disaster both because of what it does to our brains (it triggers very primal friend-vs-foe mental hardware that shuts down reason and openness to alternatives²) and because of its poor fit with our political institutions, which are specifically designed to force broad compromise by spreading power across competing institutions each of which is chosen by a separate electorate on a separate timeline. The result has been an unmitigated disaster for American democracy.

Though the conventional wisdom of an earlier generation of scholars was that the two-party system was a stabilizing force in America, they failed to understand the time-bound conditions on which this stability depended and they failed to appreciate that the reason the system worked was that the two parties themselves contained overlapping factions in what in retrospect looks much more like cross-cutting multiparty system within a two-party system. It is understandable that scholars of a previous generation would make these oversights, since the underlying conditions had been stable for many decades.

Thus, in assessing the contemporary challenges of American democracy, it is crucial to understand that the collapse of the multi-dimensional four-party system into the uni-dimensional two-party system was the consequence of three interrelated and reinforcing developments in U.S. politics over the last several decades within the context of single-winner elections and two political parties: 1) the geographical sorting of the political parties; 2) the nationalization of American politics; and 3) continued close national elections.

Because these three trends are not reversible (we have no Superman to spin the earth backward to go back in time), the conditions that previously supported a large political middle in a functioning two-party system cannot be recreated. This is why the system will not correct on its own. Instead, it must be recalibrated through active but carefully considered intervention. Let me say more briefly about each of these political developments.

In 1960, in one of the closest elections in American political history, Democrats and Republicans were able to compete in most places because both parties had liberal and conservative factions. In 1960, the parties were overlapping coalitions, and at a national level, they were both broadly moderate and centrist, even if they both had some representatives at the political extremes.

In this earlier era, neither party took a strong stance on social and cultural issues because the coalitions of both parties stretched across the country, and the divisions within the parties between socio-cultural liberals and conservatives reflected the larger divisions in the country. In this respect, it is crucial to know that the Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 both passed with super-majorities in both chambers, and Republicans were actually slightly more supportive (on balance) than Democrats.

But the civil rights revolution of the 1960s set in motion a significant realignment of American politics. As the Democratic party came to “own” the issue of civil rights, the South shifted from solidly Democratic to increasingly Republican, first in presidential voting, then in congressional voting. As cultural and social issue fissures continued to develop in the 1970s around the Vietnam War, drugs, women’s rights, abortion, and other issues, both parties began to take clearer national stances on these issues.

The 1970s were largely a period of political dealignment, in which many citizens began to reconsider their allegiances to the two major parties.³ During this period, many voters split their tickets, voting for one party for president and the other for Congress, and more than ever, voted for the candidate, not the party. In political science terms, elections had become “candidate-centric,” with incumbents cultivating “the personal vote.”⁴ Practically, it meant that individual representatives had the freedom to build their own brands, and in Congress, many entrepreneurial representatives built their own cross-partisan coalitions to tackle various issues that didn’t fit a simple left-right divide.

But by the 1980s, as “culture war” politics became increasingly central to U.S. partisan conflict, the parties took increasingly clearly differentiated stands at a national level. As southern conservatives moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, the Democratic coalition became more socially liberal, and the Republican coalition became more socially conservative. Northern and coastal liberals moved more solidly into the Democratic Party at roughly the same time. Put simply, ideological liberals and conservatives sorted themselves into political parties, and less ideological partisans updated their beliefs to match their parties.⁵

As the Republican Party became more socially conservative overall, it became harder for Republican candidates to compete in more socially liberal places. As the Democratic Party became more socially liberal overall, it became harder for Democratic candidates to compete in more culturally conservative places. Because of the nature of single-winner elections, once Democrats/Republicans fell below a competitive threshold in many parts of the country, it made less and less sense for them to compete at all for voters by investing significant resources in candidate recruitment, advertising, and voter mobilization. This led Democrats/Republicans to give up on large parts of the country, narrowing their base of support even further.

With the parties now more homogeneously split on the culturally conservative/liberal divide, the U.S. two-party system became the purest version of itself: a uniquely and historically divided two-party system with no overlap. With the Republican wave election of 2010 sweeping out the last of the Southern conservative Democrats, the four-party system almost entirely vanished, save a few legacy vestiges. A fully sorted two-party system had arrived, drawing in a new generation of candidates eager to engage in partisan warfare, and discouraging the kinds of more moderate, compromise-oriented liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats who might have entered politics in the past.⁶

Though historical analogies are never perfect, there is only one other time in which the U.S. party system was so clearly divided by geography and ideology: 1860.

The second major change that began in the 1960s was the nationalization of American politics. The remarkable growth of both social and economic federal regulation made control of Washington, DC, much more important. In short, the federal government today has a lot more power over many more areas of American life than it did 60 years ago. Before the expansion of the federal government in the 1960s and 1970s, states had much more autonomy, which meant that control of state power was often more important.

Additionally, because the Supreme Court became more important as an arbiter of social issues (notably abortion, gay marriage, and the role of religion in public life) and many conservative evangelicals felt as though their way of life was under attack by an intrusive liberal government, control of the winner-take-all presidency in particular became much more salient.

As parties became more sorted and U.S. politics nationalized, voters had a clearer sense of the consequences of Democrats or Republicans controlling Congress and the presidency. This meant that rather than voting for the candidate, it became more important to vote for the party. The watershed moment in this development was the 1994 House election. Newt Gingrich had noticed that while Republicans kept winning presidential elections, Democrats had controlled the House majority for 40 years. So rather than individual Republican candidates for the House campaigning against individual popular incumbent representatives who happened to be Democrats, they campaigned against Bill Clinton and nationalized the election. Though both parties had been doing more through their coordinated congressional and Senate campaign committees and attendant networks of campaign consultants to standardize their messages, the 1994 election marked a monumental shift in American politics. Congressional and Senate elections became more about the parties and control of Congress, and voters responded accordingly. The number of split-ticket states (for Senate) and districts (for the House) has declined steadily since.

In the Senate, only three split-delegation states remain—Maine, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—the lowest number since direct election of senators began in 1914.⁷ In the House, only 16 districts split their tickets in 2024, voting one party for president and the other for Congress—the same historically low number as 2020, and among the lowest in over a century.⁸ All 16 crossover districts had presidential margins under 10 points, reflecting the near-total collapse of split-ticket voting outside competitive terrain.⁹ Similarly, state and local candidates now emphasize national issues, and voting for all levels of government closely tracks sentiment toward the party in the White House.

The nationalization of the media is also an important part of this story. With the rise of cable news in the 1990s and the internet in the 2000s, local media began to lose share to national media, and national media became more divided to cater to competing partisan audiences, largely because conservatives built an entirely new media infrastructure to appeal to a national conservative audience.¹⁰ Media consumption polarized. Again, there is a reinforcing feedback process here. As the stakes of national elections increased, national politics became more salient. As local media diminished, more citizens eager for news were further drawn to national media, and the more they were paying attention to national (as opposed to local) stories, which further diminished their interest in local media and local politics.¹¹

The pattern of close national elections has persisted since 1994, with control of Congress and the presidency regularly changing hands. This creates powerful incentives for the party controlling government to act aggressively while it can, knowing that political winds may shift in the next election cycle. The result is an escalating spiral of partisan governance that has accelerated dramatically in recent years.

The pattern is clear: Each party, upon gaining unified control, uses that control more aggressively than its predecessor, justifying its actions by pointing to the other side’s previous behavior. Each party, when in opposition, signals that it will not cooperate with the governing party and aims to throw them out of power in the future. In 2010, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explicitly stated that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” signaling unprecedented obstruction. Democrats responded by passing the Affordable Care Act without a single Republican vote. When Republicans gained unified control in 2017, they used budget reconciliation to pass tax cuts and attempted ACA repeal through the same party-line process. When Democrats regained control in 2021, they passed the $1.9-trillion American Rescue Plan with zero Republican votes.¹² In 2024, a Republican House impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas—the first Cabinet official impeached in 148 years.¹³

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025 accelerated this dynamic to an unprecedented degree. In his first year back in office, Trump issued 225 executive orders—the most since Franklin Roosevelt’s first year in 1933, and more than his entire first term.¹⁴ These orders systematically attempted to reshape American governance in ways that provoked immediate legal challenges and institutional resistance.

Trump and Republicans claimed the aggressive actions were justified by pointing to Democratic actions during the Biden administration. Trump cited Biden’s executive orders on immigration and climate as precedent for his own expansive use of executive power. His defenders argued that if Democrats could use reconciliation for major legislation and Republicans faced impeachment proceedings, then Republicans could use all available constitutional tools when in power.

Both parties are now governing with an eye toward what the other side did last time, and the result is an escalating cycle of constitutional hardball. Both parties believe they are responding to the other’s provocations; both believe the other side would do worse if given the chance. The structural incentive is to use power maximally while you have it, because you don’t know how long you’ll have it.

When elections are persistently close and partisan polarization is extreme, the party in power faces overwhelming pressure to act aggressively. The alternative—restraint in hopes the other side will reciprocate—looks like unilateral disarmament in an environment where the other side has already demonstrated willingness to push constitutional boundaries.

But bad faith begets bad faith, and demonizing and refusing to compromise sends strong signals to partisan voters that compromise is illegitimate, and that compromising moderates must be punished.

The second consequence of constantly close elections is that it makes electioneering higher-stakes, more intense, and more aggressive. When control of power in Washington is always at stake, electioneering becomes a fevered pitch of high alert, in which the “other side” is on the verge of gaining total power that they will use to enact a radical agenda. This agitated state of high alert leads voters and politicians to demonize their political opponents even more, and to silo themselves even more in informational echo chambers, thus further deepening hyper-partisan polarization.

We have now reached the stage in this doom loop where the basic foundations of free and fair elections have become a partisan issue, and partisans on both sides support aggressively rewriting election rules, though in different directions. Moreover, if you believe the other side is trying to rig the rules in their favor through inappropriate means, this gives your side license to hit back even harder. After all, as the saying goes, only a fool brings a knife to a gun fight.

The crucial point is that none of these mechanisms are self-correcting. Rather, they are self-reinforcing.

1. The Geographical Sorting of Parties

Currently, the Democratic Party is very strong in urban and cosmopolitan parts of the country, and very weak in rural and traditional parts of the country. Because Democrats are unable to get anywhere close to the necessary 51 percent in rural districts, they do not bother to contest elections in these places. Because elected Democrats overwhelmingly come from socially and culturally liberal parts of the country, Democratic leaders take very progressive stands on cultural and social issues, which makes the Democratic Party seem even more threatening to voters in more conservative and traditional parts of the country. The same is true for Republicans, but in the reverse.

The problem here is that it is extremely difficult for parties to move to the political center when their coalitions lack any meaningful overlap, as they did in an earlier era, in which the two-party system functioned well enough because it contained a multi-dimensional four-party system inside of it.

Some political observers have noted that after Democrats lost a series of presidential elections, they moved closer to the center by nominating Bill Clinton in 1992. Bill Clinton had been the four-term governor of Arkansas, a relatively conservative state. Today, Democrats are deeply underwater in Arkansas. They have no conservative coalition within their party, just as Republicans lack an internal liberal coalition.

When the four-party system existed, Democrats had many conservatives within their party coalition who could balance out the more liberal representatives, pulling the party closer to the center. These conservatives came primarily from the South and rural areas. Republicans had many liberals in their party who could also move the party closer to the middle. These centripetal forces have now been replaced by centrifugal forces. Compromise is now punished by the threat of a primary challenge, and would-be moderates do not bother to even run.

2. The Nationalization of Politics

Though many advocates of localism and federalism argue that some polarization could be fixed by returning some power to the states and localities, the reality is that the concentration of power in Washington, DC, is difficult to reverse. When Democrats are in control in Washington, they do not like to let Republican states decide policy and so impose their own mandates. When Republicans are in control in Washington, they do not like to let Democratic states decide policy and impose their own mandates.¹⁵ In the areas where states do make policy, Republican-controlled states tend to focus on issues that are nationally salient and all move in the same direction on these issues. Democratic-controlled states similarly focus on nationally salient issues and move in tandem in the opposite direction. The divergence around abortion, guns, or climate policy is an example of this phenomenon.¹⁶

And given the power that the federal government has to impact policy in almost all areas, it is unclear how a truce would emerge within the current state of binary hyper-partisan polarization. The doom-loop continues: Hyper-partisan polarization has a strong nationalizing pull, and the nationalization of elections increases hyper-partisanship.

3. The Closeness of Elections

Finally, national elections have been extremely close for three decades now, cycling back and forth between unified government for one party, to divided government, to unified government for the other party, to divided government, and back again through the same cycle. Despite a steady stream of think pieces promising a permanent majority for one party or the other, thermostatic public opinion and cycles of engagement and cynicism keep the parties revolving in and out of power,¹⁷ with a perpetually dissatisfied and angry electorate and a split country. It seems unlikely that this cycle will end with one side winning a decisive victory, largely because so much of the country is solidly safe for one party or the other. Instead, the close elections will continue to make negative campaigning nastier and nastier, because the best way to unify and mobilize your side is always to turn up the threat of the other side winning.

4. The Bottom Line

A political center existed when the four-party system provided a large space for overlap between the two parties, with liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats providing the necessary cross-partisan bridges to make the American political system function. As liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats vanished, the center collapsed, and hyper-partisan polarization began to feed on itself. This reinforcing cycle of distrust, hatred, and escalation shows no signs of stopping on its own.