The rise of Donald Trump should inject a dose of humility into those of us who practice political science or political journalism (I plead guilty on both counts). With a few honorable exceptions, we didn’t predict what was coming, and we couldn’t believe the evidence of our own senses as it was happening. The simple truth is that we didn’t understand our country—or its politics—as well as we thought we did.
In part, this was a conceptual error. We conflated the rise of partisan polarization—a genuine and increasingly important phenomenon—with increasing distance between the parties on a left-right ideological continuum. CONT.
William A. Galston, Brookings Institution