God and Climate

The partisan polarization of the last two decades has been widely bemoaned as having destroyed American democracy’s ability to respond to pressing public problems. Polarization also poses less well-recognized problems for liberalism. A large number of liberal victories, including the passage of all of the major environmental laws of the 1970s and the revision of the Clean Air Act in 1990, have depended on support from Republicans. Liberal donors, who are less openly partisan than their counterparts on the right, rely on such bipartisan support to legitimate their engagement with public policy change. Liberal interest groups have hard-wired the pursuit of Republican coalition members into their taken-for-granted political strategies.