This week’s fea­tured FJ arti­cle is George Lake’s “The Fiery Forge of Polar­iza­tion”. I’ve been think­ing a lot about it since I first read it in sub­mis­sion form ear­li­er this year. George’s the­sis is that major polit­i­cal change tends to hap­pen in times of great polarlization.

It makes sense from a cer­tain intel­lec­tu­al lev­el. I think a lot of Trump­ism is a cer­tain seg­ment of voter’s wor­ries about the end of White dom­i­nance in this coun­try. It’s show­ing up in our pol­i­tics now because the Oba­ma years showed that we can make head­way on pro­gres­sive ideals. Only regres­sive insti­tu­tions like the elec­toral col­lege and vot­er sup­pres­sion tac­tics are keep Repub­li­cans in pow­er. The shift will hap­pen. The ques­tion is how much of our coun­try gets ripped apart in the meantime.

From my edi­to­r­i­al col­umn:

And yet in great tur­moil comes oppor­tu­ni­ty. In “The Fiery Forge of Polar­iza­tion,” George Lakey shares how his dis­may at our polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion gave way to opti­mism when he began research­ing the twentieth-century his­to­ries of Scan­di­na­vian coun­tries. They were poor, with few demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions, and polar­ized by the pol­i­tics of the 1920s and ’30s. But it was in this very cru­cible that these coun­tries began forg­ing demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions that under­lie today’s eco­nom­i­cal­ly suc­cess­ful democ­ra­cies. Fun­da­men­tal soci­etal change often hap­pens in these dark­est of times.