Fellow believers or fellow citizens?

Liberalism dies in darkness

Continued from yesterday

American political commentary has become overwhelmed with polarisation anxiety in recent years, with writers such as Jonathan Haidt, Ezra Klein and Amy Chua all lamenting their country’s divided politics.

The term ‘Cold Civil War’ has come to describe the division of hostile ideological coalitions, and some even speculate about whether that could turn hot. This year’s hit independent film, Alex Garland’s Civil War, imagined the country’s violent disintegration under the auspices of a dictatorial - obviously Republican - future president.

Civil war is unlikely in any western country in the foreseeable future, and the American system isn’t rated as being that ‘fragile’, at least according to one index, yet the recent assassination attempts on Donald Trump have inspired only further pessimism. After the Republican candidate narrowly missed a bullet in Pennsylvania, Peter Baker wrote in The New York Times that the violence ‘seems more likely to tear America further apart than to bring it together’, while The New Yorker’s David Remnick said: ‘In the coming days, things will likely not get better.’