The Washington Post‘s outstanding political commentator Paul Waldman wrote something over the Memorial Day weekend that struck a chord with me, and I expanded on it for New York.

It’s become a standard feature of big national holidays: pious chest-thumping and finger-pointing about how Americans used to truly represent a United States but have now let politicians with their petty partisan squabbles drive us apart, when a little old-fashioned good will and elbow grease would fix everything. I heard a species of this meme over the Memorial Day weekend from CBS correspondent Scott Pelley:

“Today, liberals and conservatives barricade themselves in digital citadels where some media, with calculated bias, assure their viewers that what they already believe is correct. If we wall ourselves in castles of confirming information, I fear a new Cold War. This time, a cold civil war.

“Given this danger, why do both parties promote almost nothing but divisive scandals? Because it is so much easier than health insurance or immigration reform. Taking on actual challenges would require work, and listening, and thought, and union.”

Aside from the implication that, say, the crimes and misdemeanors revealed in the Mueller report are simply “divisive scandals,” what is most objectionable about Pelley’s complaint and so many others like it is the suggestion that partisan differences are superficial, or even artificial. Yes, of course, there’s an element of self-interested gamesmanship in partisan competition, particularly in a period when neither party can secure a reliable grip on the White House, Congress, or public opinion. But you can make a strong case that today’s partisan disagreements are rooted in basic differences involving not just facts or policy positions but very basic principles and values.

Look at the key issue in the 2018 midterms, health-care policy. Even if they disagree on how to achieve universal health coverage, most Democrats agree it’s essential and a basic human right. Republicans almost never call health care a “right,” and instead tend to regard it as a scarce resource whose price should be regulated by markets and quantity should be limited by clean and responsible living. This is not a matter of “I say tomato and you say to-mah-to,” by any means.

Consider another ineluctable partisan fight concerning firearms regulation. To most Democrats, the “right to bear arms” has little or nothing to do with fanatics and other fury-driven testosterone addicts stockpiling automatic weapons and evading minimal background checks by frequenting gun shows. To nearly all Republicans now, the Second Amendment is the single most essential element of the Bill of Rights, the guarantor not only against violation of hearth and home but against tyrannical government. Maybe all partisans don’t share the views of those on the left who would ban all private gun ownership or those on the right who threaten to use their shooting irons to kill cops or soldiers who try to enforce laws they don’t like. But there’s really not much middle ground, and that’s not because partisans are inventing phony conflicts.

Look at how the two parties think about voting rights, which was once, in living memory, a truly bipartisan cause. Democrats almost invariably think of the right to vote as fundamental to democracy and resist any measures that tend to suppress the most abundant levels of participation in elections. To an ever-increasing extent, Republicans think of making voting easy as an invitation to fraud and the plundering of the public treasury by ignorant plebes who will “vote themselves benefits” in league with corrupt elites. That’s a gulf in perception that no compromise can bridge.

Check out one more issue on which the parties have become polarized: campaign-finance reform. For most Democrats, this is a common-sense matter of minimizing the strength of wealthy special interests and reducing official corruption; the whole chain of Supreme Court decisions leading up to Citizens United is considered an abomination. Most Republicans agree with the SCOTUS premise that “money is speech,” and fear campaign-finance regulation as a big step down the road to publicly financed and eventually government-controlled elections. In this case the two parties’ points of view are very nearly inverted, with the donkey’s freedom from special interests equaling the elephant’s enslavement. Can a room full of wheeling and dealing overcome that rift? I don’t think so.

Recognizing that partisanship is based on legitimate differences of opinion has huge implications for how one understands government dysfunction and the way to “fix” it, as Paul Waldman observed over the weekend:

“The reality is that we’re in an era when, unless there’s unified government, not much is going to get done, at least in terms of legislation. That’s not because there’s something wrong with Washington; it’s because the two parties have fundamentally different ideas about what we ought to do.

“Which means that, as they try to win back the White House and plan what to do with it if they succeed, Democrats don’t need to devise a strategy to persuade Republicans to join with them in a new era of bipartisan governing. They need a strategy to win full control of Congress, then a strategy to keep their members together to pass their agenda. If they manage that, nobody will complain that Washington can’t get anything done.”

This ought to be fairly obvious, but unfortunately, the idea that partisanship is somehow a free-floating demonic force rather than a reflection of deeply held values has infected political discourse even more than partisanship itself, as Waldman also notes:

“Unfortunately, politicians do a great deal to mislead voters about how politics works. Every election, candidates for the House and Senate tell voters that the problem is this thing called Washington, whose dysfunctions can be cured with the proper kick in the keister. And I, the candidate says, am just the person to do it, to change Washington into what it ought to be. Why? Not because I have policy expertise or relevant experience; those things don’t matter. No, it’s because I have common sense, and I know how to get things done.”

And so when nothing changes or partisan “dysfunction” gets even worse, voters become even more disillusioned with “Washington,” and listen to the pied pipers of rhetorical enchantment who pretend getting things done is easy for the stout-hearted and the open-minded. It’s not.

Alabama Republicans did some unexpected damage to their own party in enacted their infamous legislation banning virtually all abortions, as I observed at New York:

Not long ago I observed that the tidal wave of early-term abortion bans being enacted in Republican-controlled states was undermining the GOP’s national message claiming mainstream status for its party in contrast to those “extremist Democrats” who are willing to accept “infanticide,” the anti-abortion movement’s favored term for medically necessary late-term abortions. But now the enactment of the most extreme abortion ban yet by Alabama Republicans isn’t just stepping on the “infanticide” messaging; it’s dividing the GOP and the anti-choice movement in a noisy manner.

By far the noisiest dispute is over Alabama’s failure to provide an exception to the ban for victims of rape and incest, which the president among others suggested was a mistake.

As Trump noted, accepting rape and incest exceptions has been standard for most Republican pols dating back to Reagan, though nearly every four years the official GOP platform omits them. The reason for making these exceptions is baldly political: Banning abortion in such cases is very unpopular. Indeed, even in Alabama a 2018 poll showed 65 percent of respondents opposing a ban when the pregnancy is the product of rape or incest.

Republicans have a particularly vivid example in recent political history of the peril of not accepting a rape exception: the 2012 elections, when not one but two favored Republican Senate candidates (Missouri’s Todd Akin and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock) lost after saying stupid and offensive things to justify forcing victims of rape to carry pregnancies to term.

But in the wake of the Alabama law, the always-latent pro-life support for a rigorously logical abortion ban without such exceptions has emerged with new force, dismissing the 2012 calamity as the result of an inept presentation of the case rather than its inherent demerits, as Ruth Graham recently explained:

“Alabama’s decision to omit exceptions (other than when the mother’s life is at serious risk) is partly because the law’s proponents wanted a ‘clean’ bill to directly challenge Roe v. Wade in the court system. But it is also a reflection of the coalescing consensus in contemporary anti-abortion circles that rape and incest exceptions are morally unacceptable.

“’For many traditional pro-life groups, this is now a litmus test for your seriousness about being in favor of the prenatal child,’ said anti-abortion ethicist Charles Camosy, the author of a new book on the connections between abortion and issues including immigration and mass incarceration. ‘Lost is any sense of complexity about the actual arguments, much to the detriment of the movement both intellectually and politically.'”

This quiet area of disagreement within the anti-abortion movement and the GOP never mattered much when the main divisions were between parties that accepted and rejected basic reproductive rights. But they are flaring up now, particularly after Trump, 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, and even Christian right warhorse Pat Robertson all went out of their way to call the Alabama law “extreme.”

The dispute over rape exceptions won’t subside even if interest in the Alabama law recedes, since Republicans in Missouri (Todd Akin’s state) are on the brink of enacting a less-restrictive ban on early-term abortions with no exceptions other than threats to the life of the woman involved. Other states could follow in what is now looking like an anti-abortion–GOP stampede into the fever swamps.

Here’s an illustrative jeremiad from right-wing radio-talk-show veteran Steve Deace, writing for Glenn Beck’s website:

“[A]t the time the pro-life movement is finally authoring real legislation to cast out this demonic stronghold over the culture once and for all, ‘I’m pro-life but’ celebrity fauxservatives are lining up to let cable news bookers know they’re not as primitive as those folks who believe ‘thou shall not murder’ is a commandment and not a mere suggestion …

“God bless all those who will now seize this moment in the fight against one of the worst genocides in human history by refusing to let these ‘I’m pro-life but’ fauxservatives get away with the most preposterous and wicked equivocations.”

Deace also reflects the underlying delusion that Alabama’s action represents some great turning point in public opinion on abortion:

“The tide is turning on this issue like I’ve never seen before. Do your part to make sure that continues. Don’t accept lies. Don’t accept excuses. Don’t accept cowardice.”

It doesn’t help the anti-abortion movement or its major-party vehicle that the wait for SCOTUS action on their issue could be extended, particularly if it transpires that the five-justice conservative bloc on the Court is divided on how or how quickly to proceed. The divisions we are seeing thanks to the Alabama law do little but to show the rest of the world that all these people are extremists when it comes to their determination to ban the 99-plus percent of abortions that are not caused by rape or incest.

I’ve been watching the president’s job approval ratings closely, and they’re again reverting to a mediocre mean, as I observed at New York:

Week before last, I wondered if at long last we were finally seeing a significant lift in the president’s job-approval ratings of the sort Republicans had been predicting from practically the moment the man took office:

“This morning as on every weekday morning I glanced at RealClearPolitics’ polling average for the president’s job-approval ratings, and I nearly dropped my coffee cup: It was at 45.1 percent. Just yesterday I had written that Trump had ‘yet to hit 45 percent in average approval ratings at either RealClearPolitics or FiveThirtyEightsince the earliest days of his presidency.’ Scanning RCP’s graph of past averages, I learned that today’s was Trump’s highest average approval rating since February 20, 2017.

“So is the president undergoing some sort of serious improvement in his famously stagnant levels of popularity, which could result in him reaching levels consistent with past presidents who were reelected? Are the economy and the triumphant GOP spin on the Mueller report combining to give him an unprecedented lift?”

I expressed some skepticism about that possibility, and indicated time would tell. Looks like it has. Trump’s approval-rating average at RCP hasn’t drifted ever upward, but is back down to 43 percent. At FiveThirtyEight, it’s at 41.8 percent. Most startling of all, it’s at 44 percent in the Rasmussen tracking poll, which is the lowest it’s been since February 1. The president has been known to tweet out unusually favorable numbers from this poll. He’s not going to mention this one.

We’ve been here many times before. Gallup calculates Trump’s average approval rating for throughout his presidency at 40 percent. Apart from a dip into the high 30s when he was unsuccessfully trying to kill Obamacare in 2017, the low 40s are where he’s been consistently in the RCP averages; at FiveThirtyEight (which weighs results for polling quality and partisan bias), he’s similarly very near where he’s usually been, with somewhat more frequent and recent dips into the high 30s.

So it’s more and more evident that the man’s popularity simply isn’t very elastic, regardless of economic conditions and/or the daily gyrations of his Twitter feed and the partisan conflict in Washington. And it reinforces the very high likelihood that his reelection is going to depend not on any Trump surge in approval but on dragging his Democratic opponents down into the depths of popular opprobrium right along with him, like an alligator executing a death roll to drown its prey.

In listening to some of the intra-Democratic discussion of Trump as an “aberration,” I felt the need to weigh in at New York with some not-so-distant memories:

One of the latent questions in American politics for both parties is whether Donald J. Trump is some sort of horror-movie version of a unicorn, who after this term, and perhaps another one, will retreat to Mar-a-Lago, leaving the Republican Party — and the United States — scarred but not fundamentally changed. For obvious reasons, Republicans don’t discuss this view of their own future very openly, lest their master resent the suggestion that he’s a man whose moment is rapidly slipping away. You hear the subject discussed more among Democrats, particularly those who are running for president to consign Trump to the ash bin of history. Joe Biden, for example, has made it clear he considers the 45th president an aberration, whose evil spell over Republicans will dissipate once he’s out of office.

But Trump’s undoubtedly strange and outlandish personality should not make us forget that the party he took by force in 2016 was already exhibiting an alarming extremism on multiple issues. Here’s Barack Obama being hopeful about Republicans in 2012:

“President Obama told supporters that he expected the gridlock to end after the election, when Republicans can stop worrying about voting him out of office.

“’My expectation is that if we can break this fever, that we can invest in clean energy and energy efficiency because that’s not a partisan issue,’ Obama said, speaking to supporters in Minneapolis.

“Obama pointed to deficit reduction, a transportation bill, and immigration reform as initiatives that could well pass in November.”

None of that happened, of course. And instead of getting over their “fever” of policy extremism and tactical obstructionism, what did Republicans do? They nominated Donald Trump as their next presidential candidate.

Mitt Romney, one of the GOP’s most respectable figures, advocated immigration policies arguably to the right of Trump’s in his pursuit of the 2012 presidential nomination. He also endorsed the Ryan budgets (reflecting the party’s hard-core commitment to “entitlement reform” and an end to decades of anti-poverty measures), and supported the cut, cap, balance pledge to permanently shrink the size of the federal government. And most famously, he embraced one of the foundational myths of conservative extremism in his remarks that the votes of “47 percent” of Americans had been corruptly bought by welfare-state benefits, thus implicitly making those votes illegitimate.

For the ninth consecutive time, the GOP platform on which Romney ran in 2012 called not just for the reversal of reproductive rights in Roe v. Wade but the constitutional enshrinement of fetal (even embryonic) rights in a Human Life Amendment that would ban states from allowing abortions from the moment of conception.

All that was mainstream Republican policy pre-Trump. In the ever-more-militant conservative wing of the party, the big fashion in the early years of this decade was to call oneself a “constitutional conservative.” As I tried to explain at the time, this meant something genuinely alarming:

“I do worry that the still-emerging ideology of ‘constitutional conservatism’ is something new and dangerous, at least in its growing respectability. It’s always been there in the background, among the Birchers and in the Christian Right, and as as emotional and intellectual force within Movement Conservatism. It basically holds that a governing model of strictly limited (domestic) government that is at the same time devoted to the preservation of ‘traditional culture’ is the only legitimate governing model for this country, now and forever, via the divinely inspired agency of the Founders. That means democratic elections, the will of the majority, the need to take collective action to meet big national challenges, the rights of women and minorities, the empirical data on what works and what doesn’t — all of those considerations and more are so much satanic or ‘foreign’ delusions that can and must be swept aside in the pursuit of a Righteous and Exceptional America.”

A first cousin to, or perhaps just a corollary of, constitutional conservatism is the belief, which has spread rapidly through the GOP ranks, that the Second Amendment is the most important element of the Bill of Rights and includes an implicit right to armed revolution against “tyranny,” as defined by, well, constitutional conservatives. It wasn’t Donald Trump who espoused that point of view during the 2016 Republican presidential nominating process, but his rivals Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Ben Carson.

Constitutional conservatism has more or less been absorbed into “America First” Trumpism, but the way of thinking hasn’t gone away — as evidenced by Trump’s tendency to disregard those aspects of the Constitution that don’t suit his needs, while deifying those that do. When it comes to extremist goals like banning abortion entirely, or defending an absolutist view of gun rights, or sealing the borders, or making freedom of religion contingent upon its consistency with “Judeo-Christian heritage,” Trump is a louder champion of extremism, but hardly novel. And even where Trump has departed from hard-core conservative orthodoxy, he seems to have coarsened it more than anything else, viz the open pro-corporate mercantilism of his trade policy, and the supposed “non-interventionism” that is accompanied by constant threats of military violence.

Yes, there are long-term demographic trends that could make Republican extremism no longer practicable, but you have to figure the GOP will have to lose a few more presidential elections before that lesson sinks in; extremism does, if nothing else, help mobilize the party “base” and attract highly motivated donors. For every Democrat baffled by Trump’s win in 2016, there’s a Republican who believes the formula will work forever. For the legions of younger Republicans who have probably never met a genuinely “moderate” GOP leader in their lives, the “fever” could be especially persistent.

Practical politics aside, progressives need to take seriously the possibility that their counterparts on the right feel just as passionately about fetal life, the alleged threat of immigrants to civilization, and the decline of religious affiliation and 1950s-style patriarchal “family values” as those on the left feel about climate change or equality. Those who doubt the staying power of conservative extremism beyond its relationship to Trump should take another look at Michael Anton’s 2016 essay arguing that the condition of liberal-dominated American society is so catastrophically dire that voting for Trump is a survival impulse like that of the terrorism victims who stormed the cockpit of United Flight 93 on 9/11. Trump’s 2016 victory was in no small part the product of that brand of extremism, not its cause.

Sometimes a political party’s left hand doesn’t seem to know what the right hand is doing, and that’s happening to Republicans on abortion policy, as I noted this week at New York:

For many years, the chief political strategy of the anti-abortion movement has been to gradually chip away at reproductive rights by focusing on rare but lurid-sounding late-term abortions. It made sense, given the unpopularity of such procedures (particularly when presented without the context of the tragic circumstances involved) and the overwhelming popularity of legalized early-term abortions, whose criminalization is the movement’s ultimate goal. Once the regime set up by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey is unraveled, anti-abortion proponents thought, it might be time to stop the charade and go public with a more radical agenda.

But as my colleague Irin Carmon recently explained, as pro-lifers have gained power in state legislatures via the Republican Party they now completely dominate, the temptation to go for the anti-choice gold has been too strong for many to resist, as evidenced by the sudden rush to enact “heartbeat” bills that ban abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy:

“Heartbeat bans are suddenly in place, if not in effect, in Ohio, Georgia, Mississippi, and Kentucky …

“For nearly a half century, the Supreme Court has said that states can’t ban abortion before a fetus is viable — no earlier than 24 weeks, not six, before many women even know they’re pregnant. That’s why the focus-grouped, gray-suited architects of the anti-abortion movement believe total bans hurt their cause. They’ve read the polls that say Americans broadly support abortion in the first trimester, that they don’t want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, and that they squirm when they hear about the later abortions allowed under it: after 20 weeks, or later for reasons of health or life.”

Yet states’ early-term abortion bans are becoming more radical every day, culminating in this week’s passage of legislation in Alabama that would ban all abortions from the moment of conception other than those necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman. There aren’t even exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest.

As a matter of constitutional law, it’s unlikely that even today’s 5-4 majority of presumed abortion foes on the Supreme Court would choose so extreme a law as the lever to reverse or modify its reproductive-rights precedents. If they do want to go in that direction, laws regulating later-term abortions — such as the 20-week bans popular among Republican legislators in many states and in Washington, too — are a more likely vehicle.

But beyond that, such laws uncloak the ultimate goals of the GOP and the RTL movement at a time when Republicans are trying to brand Democrats as an extremist party that supports abortions so late in pregnancy that they can be labeled “infanticide.” As National Journal reports, this is a big deal for Donald Trump’s party heading toward 2020:

“President Trump has laced it into his rally repertoire, calling Democrats ‘the party of high taxes, high crime, open borders, late-term abortion, witch hunts, and delusions.’ And as campaigns continue to ramp up for 2019 and 2020, there is little expectation among Republicans that the abortion message will fizzle …

“The issue was sparked in January, when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the Reproductive Health Act, which expanded limited abortion rights beyond the 24th week of pregnancy, and days later when Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam made comments about a bill in his state loosening restrictions on late-term abortions …

“Critics call the infanticide claims manufactured outrage, pointing to the existing laws that criminalize action taken to end a newborn’s life. As it stands, late-term abortion — generally referring to those after 20 weeks of gestation — is a rare procedure typically done in the interest of protecting the mother’s health, according to a 2018 Congressional Research Service report.

But it’s kind of hard to pose as the party in the firm mainstream of public opinion on abortion, fighting those baby-killing Democrats, when one’s own Republicans are trying to ban the bulk of abortions that occur early in pregnancy. It’s not just a mixed message but arguably an honest statement of principles stepping all over a calculated lie.

Some observers suggest the infanticide talk may be “cover” for the early-abortion prohibition measures beginning to sweep through Republican legislatures. If so, it may not be loud enough to drown out the howls of triumph from extremist lawmakers in places like Alabama or the cries of dismay from those who previously thought basic reproductive rights were safe. It’s hard to look at all this state-level activity and not quickly discern who the real “extremists” are.