The Three Schisms That Will Determine the Future of America
Which side can close the breach, and how will that tip the balance of power? [3 min]
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The past two weeks have made deep-seated schisms in both parties explode to the surface.
On the Democratic side, the long simmering split between what we can call “mainline” Democrats and “progressives” was thrust onto center stage on Tuesday by Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary.
It's become a Rorschach test for both wings, with more traditional Dems saying the result was really about blowback to a scandal-hit establishment figure, while progressives tend to see it as a sign that cultural progressivism combined with populist economics is a winning formula.
My answer earlier this week was a “yes, and”— yes this was a very special case, and yes there is indeed a generalizable lesson to be drawn from what worked for Mamdani. But it isn’t so much about progressivism, and it can actually work for the whole party:
On the Republican side, the issues run just as deep. The split within the Republican Party over Donald Trump's “one big beautiful bill” was eclipsed in the past week only by the split within the party over his decision to bomb Iran.
For now, as usually happens in today’s MAGA GOP, the short term answer was for everyone to scream Trump’s praises while the few remaining functional adults in the party tried desperately to steer things behind the scenes (although in different directions, especially when it came to Medicaid cuts and tax cuts).
But that is just papering over the underlying divide between actual conservatives—who have long ago traded in their values for the mess of pottage of being in power—and Donald Trump's cult of personality movement that really has no specific ideology or coherent economic theory at all, let alone a conservative one.
And all of that is a subset of the bigger schism in America between the two major political parties.
I wanted to explore all three splits in my podcast this week, so I invited in Matt Wylie, a top Republican political consultant who is not afraid to lob figurative bombs at Trump or his own party. We got into:
What’s happening on the Democratic side—what actually worked for Mamdani, how Republicans will (or won’t) be able to weaponize it against other candidates, and whether Democrats can use the lessons learned to win in 2026
What’s happening on the Republican side—and especially who’s really to blame for the multiple disasters that Trump has wrought
What the polarization is really about between the parties, and whether there is actually a way through it and back to a saner exchange of ideas and the kind of productive compromise that most voters could support
You can watch/listen to the full conversation here:
This discussion is important, mostly because it provides hope for better days.