As politics has become more postmaterial [i.e., more about ideas than about bread-and-butter issues], we have witnessed what some have called “the great sorting out,” the ideological organization of some political parties, wherein both align around very narrow languages in which to frame their purposes. (This seems aggravated by actual geographic sorting, where places become more ideologically monochromatic, so that locales polarize too.) Those who identify with each party have different interests and different views of the place of government in society. The candidates from each party respond to their party constituents and pursue policies that reflect their electoral base. Each party’s voters are more favorable toward their own candidate and more disdainful of opponents, but leaders have less flexibility to handle the various challenges they face, for they are held to higher standards for ideological consistency by voters. Increasingly, the center in American political life is not, in Arthur Schlesinger’s terms, a “vital center,” one that hews to a common public philosophy and that shares a common cultural sensibility; it is increasingly becoming, in the words of James Davison Hunter, merely a “statistical phenomenon.” Politics is made simpler because of all of this, but civic life–which politics is supposed to serve–is made harder. When the two sides polarize, politics becomes all about one side winning.
~Charles Matthewes, The Republic of Grace: Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), p. 133
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