Unsurprisingly, Political Animal Kevin Drum's analysis of today's Washington Post article on America's Red-Blue divide is right on the mark:

Kevin Drum: It's a vicious circle. As people become more polarized, they seek out their soulmates and this polarizes them even further. This in turn causes politicians to realize that they need to appeal to the poles in order to win, so they ratchet up the rhetoric. In the end, voters force politicians to extremes, and politicians eagerly feed the beast to get elected — and the circle is completed.

About all I'd add is a mild criticism of the WaPo piece itself, which for some reason rather conspicuously fails to note the elephant (or, if you prefer, the donkey) in the room once it gets about the business of trying to explain how and why we reached this point: namely, the continuing democratization of American politics.

Replacing the party bosses and smoke-filled rooms of the past with open primaries and sunshine laws has basically given us what we wanted -- a cleaner, more responsive kind of politics. But, as any citizen of a parliamentary democracy could tell you, responsive politics tends to be polarized politics. That's the trade-off. And it's one that most people can live with, I think. The real question now is whether and when the institutions in Washington, which seem to be growing more dysfunctional with each election, will begin to figure out how to govern effectively in this increasingly partis--, er, responsive environment.

UPDATE: James Joyner has more Red-Blue here.

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