In order for democracy to work, competing parties must accept that they can lose elections, and that it’s okay. But when partisans see their political opposition not just as the opposition, but as a genuine threat to the well-being of the nation, support for democratic norms fades because “winning†becomes everything. Politics, in turn, collapses into an all-out war of “us against them,†a kind of “pernicious polarization†that appears over and over again in democratic collapses, and bears a striking similarity to what’s currently happening in the U.S.
