This divergence itself creates enormous strain on the country’s cohesion, but more and more even that looks like only a way station. “The structural attacks on our institutions that paved the way for Trump’s candidacy will continue to progress,” Podhorzer argues, “with or without him at the helm.”Īll of this is fueling what I’ve called “the great divergence” now under way between red and blue states. And it is determined to impose its policy and social vision on the entire country-with or without majority support.

It is a multipronged, fundamentally antidemocratic movement that has built a solidifying base of institutional support through conservative media networks, evangelical churches, wealthy Republican donors, GOP elected officials, paramilitary white-nationalist groups, and a mass public following. equivalent to the authoritarian parties in places such as Hungary and Venezuela. Like other analysts who study democracy, he views the Trump faction that now dominates the Republican Party-what he terms the “MAGA movement”-as the U.S. But he’s warning that the pressure on the country’s fundamental cohesion is likely to continue ratcheting up in the 2020s. Podhorzer isn’t predicting another civil war, exactly.

And those dividing lines were largely set at the nation’s founding, when slave states and free states forged an uneasy alliance to become ‘one nation.’” The differences among states in the Donald Trump era, he writes, are “very similar, both geographically and culturally, to the divides between the Union and the Confederacy. To Podhorzer, the growing divisions between red and blue states represent a reversion to the lines of separation through much of the nation’s history. This is not a metaphor it is a geographic and historical reality.” We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. “When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. I t may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America.

The red nation red deal