Thomas E. Mann, arguing that U.S. political dysfunction is more extreme than political scientists are willing to acknowledge, asserts (and demonstrates) that paralyzing party polarization is asymmetric:
That mismatch between parties and governing institutions is exacerbated by the fact that the polarization is asymmetric. Republicans have become a radical insurgency—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. The evidence of this asymmetry is overwhelming.The time frame for this accelerating dysfunction is approxmately 1980 - present:
And Norm Ornstein and I in It’s Even Worse Than It Looks document how the asymmetry developed from Newt Gingrich in the 1980s to the present. Asymmetric polarization has found its way to the public: Republican Party voters are more skewed to their ideological pole than Democratic Party voters are to theirs.Serendipity: continuing my slow plow through Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century this morning, I came across the foundational fact base:
