Every year or so, one of the big polling outfits comes up with a new political typology intended to move us beyond the simplistic red/blue partisan dichotomy that dominates so much commentary about politics in the U.S. The reason that dichotomy dominates the way it does is obvious: Because America has a two-party system, and we're quite narrowly (and deeply) divided. That reality leads us to think in terms of either/or: Either you're a Republican or a Democrat, a Trump supporter or a Trump hater, a conservative or a liberal, a reactionary or a progressive, a red American or a blue American, and so forth. At the most macro level, this dichotomous way of thinking is accurate. The 2024 election was Trump v. Harris. Either/or. 49.8 percent voted for the first, 48.3 percent voted for the second. That's 98.1 percent of the more than one hundred fifty million people who voted. Studies have shown that had every eligible person voted that year, the outcome would have been very close to the same, with Trump probably expanding his margin somewhat. So there we are: Two countries, red and blue, narrowly divided, either/or....

Given President Trump's disregard for long-standing political norms and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, many Americans fear that he is hostile to democracy. According to this view, the 49.8 percent of voters who supported him in 2024 must simply be unaware of the existential threat he poses to our republic. The logic, to Trump's critics, is therefore simple: Once voters fully grasp that democracy is under threat from creeping authoritarianism, then surely they will turn against Trump. Yet this strategy has largely fallen flat. Why' The consulting and pro-democracy organizations where we work have spent the past few months with conservative Trump voters across three counties in Wyoming, Michigan, and South Carolina. We learned that many do indeed revere America's founding design, including the Constitution, free and fair elections, the Electoral College, and the rule of law. But these voters feel that government institutions have drifted from their founding values and priorities, which they classify as faith, or the belief that moral authority precedes political authority; family, the primary unit of social life and obligation; freedom, mainly from government overreach; and place, or the importance of local community over national abstraction. The people we spoke with explained that by forsaking these values, the country's political institutions have lost touch with the moral ethos that they believe should guide public life, and that these institutions were designed to protect....

A couple of weeks ago, Democrats posted a photo of James Talarico, the U.S. Senate candidate in Texas, captioned 'November, here we come.' Talarico, strangely alone at a picnic table, is wearing a lone-star flag button-down, and he has four baskets piled with fried foods in front of him and, most significant, a turkey leg thicker than his forearm jammed in his mouth. Presumably, this image is a response to Republicans calling Talarico all manner of terms that effectively mean 'unmanly': low-T, transgender, secretly a woman, gay, man-child, and'God forbid'vegan. Democrats could dismiss this line of attack as childish and homophobic. But they are not. Instead, Talarico's campaign staff are widely circulating the turkey-leg image to send the message that their man is not merely a man, but a caveman. The MAGA movement has fully embraced masculinism, which The Atlantic's staff writer Helen Lewis defines in her cover story this month as 'a movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men.' Democrats have a more complicated relationship with machismo. After the last presidential election, when Donald Trump made inroads with even young men of color, some Democrats began wondering whether their party did indeed have a man problem. This campaign season, one Democratic candidate who seems to be addressing that concern is Graham Platner, an oyster-farming combat veteran....

I'll be doing a Substack Live appearance with Luke Hallam of Persuasion to talk about my previous post, on Trump as the first postmodern president, on Wednesday, June 10 at 1pm. Subscribers should receive an email once we're about to start, allowing you to join us if you wish. I hope to 'see' you there. One reason I've been writing less frequently these past two weeks is that I needed to travel to Washington D.C. for two events: the bi-annual American Political History conference, where I chaired a panel on paleoconservatism; and a course for incoming interns at the Niskanen Center, to which I contributed by teaching a three-hour session on the populist challenge to liberalism. The bulk of the readings I assigned for the latter were adapted from my own Substack posts, so those undergraduates are now honorary members of the 'Notes from the Middleground' family. But this isn't a post about either of those events. It's a post about what it felt like to spend several days in the nation's capital a little less than a month away from the nation's 250th anniversary celebration, while staying in a hotel just a couple of blocks away from the White House while it's occupied by a corrupt, incompetent, malicious, and cognitively addled aspiring tyrant....