Where Does American Democracy Go From Here? New York Times (behind paywall), March 17, 2022

Freedom House: The United States had slid down its ranking of countries by political rights and civil liberties — it is now 59th on Freedom House’s list, slightly below Argentina and Mongolia.

Mason: The word “identity” keeps coming up, and this is a really crucial part of it. And remember that we have research about intergroup conflict, right? Don’t look at this as, like, a logical disagreement situation. We’re not disagreeing on what kind of tax structure we should have. We’re not just disagreeing about the role of the federal government in American society. What we’re disagreeing about is increasingly the basic status differences between groups of people that have existed in America for a very long time. One of the things that Nathan Kalmoe and I found in our forthcoming book is that if you look at Democrats and Republicans who really, really hate each other and call each other evil and say the other party is a threat to the United States, the best predictor of that is how they think about the traditional social hierarchy. (read more) (behind paywall)