People are worried about coups, but the thing causing me real despair is the prospect of living for decades in an ever-tightening vice of right-wing gerrymandering and court packing, in which there is no election victory large enough to permit anyone left of center to govern

Self-styled moderates in the political class see this as salutary, because they think it forces compromise. But it doesn’t, even in the most optimistic rendering, because the right has no such limitation. The right can easily secure governing trifectas with a minority of the vote

The undemocratic structure of our government has created a one-way ratchet: Republicans win total control and further clamp down on civil society, then government becomes divided, creating an interregnum in which they block any swing in the other direction.

Republicans are able to always win either total control or divided control despite barely ever winning a majority of votes.

Democrats are only able to win either divided control or lose all control, despite almost always producing a majority of votes.

Only a couple oscillations of this one-way pendulum since 2000 has produced four catastrophic years of Donald Trump. What is going to happen on the next swing?

And don’t let it go unnoticed that in addition to the majority of voters, the disadvantaged side of the electorate contains the vast majority of nonwhite Americans, including almost all black Americans.

In order to ensure that conservative white men never leaves the driver seat of US politics, Republicans are reducing us to one-party minority rule.

And so we’re rebuilding an apartheid state, election by election, one four-year cycle at a time.

And what’s truly shocking is that so many people in our politics don’t even see it. To them, it’s simply the natural order that men like McConnell have permanent voice in government.

They never think to question how it is that a party that wins so few votes never leaves power.