When the sides ‘stop being the sides’

Former Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) recently argued that “Congress is not wrestling with big or important questions right now.” It’s a familiar critique. Americans across the spectrum have long been frustrated by performative politics crowding out substantive debate.

But Sasse paired that observation with a deeper warning: “What the digital revolution does is it accelerates almost everything about the human experience.” Taken together, these ideas point to something more unsettling than legislative stagnation. They suggest that the very conditions for meaningful political debate may be eroding faster than our institutions can respond.

At Unite America’s Invest in Democracy Summit, I heard a line that captured something shifting beneath American politics:  “I didn’t change sides, it just turned out the sides aren’t the sides anymore.”

This reflects a growing realization: the traditional boundaries of political disagreement are being overtaken by a more fundamental question: What rules still govern our democracy?

There was a time when political conflict, even at its most intense, rested on a shared foundation. Candidates debated policy and ideology, but there was still an implicit agreement about reality itself. Voters could assume that what they were seeing — an ad, a video, a quote — even if partisan, was grounded in something real.

That assumption is now under threat. One of the big questions Congress is not grappling with is what happens when technology accelerates not just communication, but distortion.

The old dividing lines — left and right, conservative and liberal — matter less than a more basic divide, between those willing to compete within democratic norms and those willing to exploit their collapse. 

The warning signs are already here. In New Hampshire, anonymous actors distributed........

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