And where are we now? Has the fever passed? Not by a long shot. America is in the grips of a simply staggering amount of partisan animosity. As I wrote in my newsletter last week, overwhelming majorities of Republicans and Democrats believe that their opponents are “hateful,” “racist,” “brainwashed” and “arrogant.” Half of the respondents to a 2022 University of California Davis survey agreed that “in the next several years, there will be civil war in the United States,” and roughly 20 percent agreed that political violence was “at least sometimes justifiable.” A recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that 34 percent of likely voters (including a plurality of Republicans) think red and blue states need a national divorce.
