Guest Post by Ben Hunt
Tony Soprano: My estimate, historically? Eighty percent of the time it ends up in the can like Johnny Sack. Or on the embalming table at Cozzarelli’s.
Bobby Bacala: Don’t even say it.
Tony Soprano: No risk, no reward.
Bobby Bacala: I mean, our line of work, it’s always out there. You probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?
― The Sopranos, “Soprano Home Movies” (2007)
I’m going to jump right into this sequel to Things Fall Apart (Part 1), without a heavy recap of that note. The skinny recap is that if you have a two-party political system with high-peaked bimodal electorate preferences, as the United States began to develop in 2014 and has now fully formed, there are no winning centrist politicians and no stable centrist policies. Instead you have – politically speaking, at least – what Yeats called a widening gyre, where a steady stream of extremist candidates, each very attractive to their party base, pull the overall electorate into a greater and greater state of polarization. In other words, if you enjoyed the choices America had in the 2016 presidential election, you’re gonna love 2020.
Continue reading “Things Fall Apart (Part 2)”
