The themes here remind me of another politics-is-the-new-religion article by David French, "America Is in the Grips of a Fundamentalist Revival". [1] In it he

The themes here remind me of another politics-is-the-new-religion article by David French, "America Is in the Grips of a Fundamentalist Revival". [1] In it he draws a distinction between religion and fundamentalist religion (which the author has a background with), with a key quality of the latter being a lack of a sort of humility, a certainty that they're right. Which in turn leads them to be less tolerant of opposing viewpoints - because (in their view) they can see right and wrong so clearly, it pulls them to the position that "error has no rights". That being said, I think it is easy to pay too much attention to the extremes. An analysis of the US's political problems is out of scope of a HN comment, but one thing I did recently was read books by two prolific authors on the US left and right [2] (who each have historically been aligned with one of our two political parties). They both contained opposing narratives covering the last 100 years or so, but what was very interesting was how they both overlapped around certain key historical/political events. I think reading these books was quite helpful for my understanding of US politics in a way that isn't really covered by the news cycle (in the future, I'd like to spend more time reading these sorts of books and less time on news). [1] https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/america-is-in-the-grips-of-a-fundamentalist https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/america-is-in-the-grip... [2] Paul Krugman's "The Conscience of a Liberal" and Charles Murray's "By the People"