As much as I don't put much stock into what the WSJ Editorial Board writes, the underlying premise of the image caption that @hyp called out below isn't wrong. For decades, right- and left-aligned activist ecosystems – formally and informally tethered to Republicans and Democrats – have helped keep Americans locked into permanent conflict over wedge issues. Not to resolve the issues, but to manage the population. The point isn’t progress; it’s polarization. If people are kept angry, fearful and morally activated, the two parties that dominate US politics can continue to govern without materially improving most people’s lives: all while endlessly insisting that a vote for anyone else is an existential risk. This dynamic is laid out clearly in The Polarizers, in which Sam Rosenfeld explained how both parties became structurally dependent on activist coalitions whose power flows from conflict rather than compromise. Over time, those coalitions didn’t just influence the parties: they reshaped them, rewarding ideological rigidity, punishing cross-cutting cooperation and turning politics into a zero-sum identity struggle. In that system, polarization isn’t a failure mode. It’s the business model. The result is a political order where institutional paralysis is reframed as virtue, where governance is secondary to signaling, and where Americans are told – over and over – that the only alternatives to their “side” are chaos, tyranny or national collapse. That fear narrative is what sustains the duopoly. This is why I’ve said for more than a decade now that the two-party death grip on US politics is not just unhealthy: it is the single greatest threat to US national security. A country that cannot solve problems because its political system depends on keeping its citizens bitterly divided is a country that will eventually fail under pressure, whether that pressure comes from economic shocks, climate stress, technological disruption or internal violence. Polarization isn’t protecting the republic. It’s hollowing it out. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo24660595.html