One worry I have

about Democrats right now is that they do not want to confront how much of the country disagrees with them.

In the end, most Americans want America to work. They know we disagree with one another. They don’t want us to hate one another. These divisions exist not just in the country but also in our communities, in our families. They’re painful. They want politicians capable of making that problem better, not worse.

It asked Americans what they thought the top problem facing the country was. No. 1 was the economy. That was what I expected. But No. 2 wasn’t immigration or inflation or democracy or climate change or even Trump. It was political division. In that same poll, 64 percent of the country said we’re too divided to solve our problems.

There is no rule of civic generosity or political practice that Trumpism hasn’t broken

Across much of this country, voters don’t agree with the Democratic Party as they understand it, and more fundamentally, they believe the Democratic Party doesn’t agree with — or respect — them.

And for many I know on the left, it’s led to a kind of political despair:

Attention is the most valuable currency in modern politics, and these platforms are where it is traded.

A

September poll

from The Washington Post and Ipsos found that 54 percent of voters thought the Democratic Party was too liberal and 49 percent thought the Republican Party was too conservative.

The conversations pulsing across these platforms are shaped not by civic values but by whatever proves to keep people scrolling: