What if Political Polarization Is Not the Disease but the Cure?

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly essay from Washington on politics, demographics and inequality.

With President Trump in the White House, rising authoritarianism has prompted a battle royal within academia over polarization, pitting those who argue that it undermines democracy against those who see it as a tool to motivate defenders of democracy.

This debate in the rarefied atmosphere of elite academia is virtually certain to have real-world consequences three weeks from now, as Democrats are heavy favorites to take control of the House and have something like a 50-50 shot of turning the Senate. In power, they will have to decide how tough and how aggressive to be in pushing back against the Trump administration.

Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the groundbreaking 2018 book “Uncivil Agreement,” is a prime exemplar of this shift.

In the book, Mason described how in recent decades, on both the American right and left, voters’ multiple social identities — race, religion, ideology, cultural outlook and party affiliation — increasingly aligned. The result: Elections became matters of political........

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