Andrew Flintoff is set be involved in England's coaching set-up again in the future, says limited-overs head coach Matthew Mott.

The former US presidential candidate says his new party, Forward, can disrupt the dysfunction of the two-party system.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I asked readers, “Do you trust America’s institutions more than, less than, or as much as you did a decade ago? Why?”

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Judith sees distrust as a sign of cultural maturity:

I believe that the widespread loss of trust in institutions is a combination of two equally strong forces. The first is our culture’s maturing beyond facile acceptance of what we are told by those institutions into a more confident posture of questioning what we are told based on what we know and believe.

The second force is the universal availability of information about every topic of interest in every country and every culture on Earth.

The second force feeds the first, and vice versa, leading to a noisier and more active populace.

The more naive an individual, the more trusting; the more knowledgeable the individual, the less trusting. As our society has matured over time, and as knowledge has spread exponentially, as a culture we have come to understand that institutional malfeasance is nothing new.

The mature within a society will naturally question institutional dominance and more responsibly and openly hold those institutions to higher standards of trustworthiness. Today more people are more knowledgeable than in all of history, and institutions have not quite caught up to that reality.

M. argues that “it is not the institutions that people distrust, rather it is the individuals who represent, work for, or act in the name of those institutions who have lost the public’s respect and trust.”

For example:

So many of our leaders across business, politics, religion, and social organizations see a leadership role as a way to enrich themselves or their families in the short term, regardless of the long-term cost to their organizations. It is much more difficult than in the past to do so without getting caught. Additionally, incremental changes that bring long-term gain are no longer considered success. We have to get everything we want immediately or we have failed, as reflected in short-term-ism for quarterly results in business and passing legislation only when you hold the White House and both houses of Congress in politics. That results in people cutting corners or working in the gray to get theirs while they can––and a decrease of trust in the institution, which is an innocent victim.

NK is “unbearably horrified with what has been happening to academia,” and explains:

I call it social-justice fundamentalism, or SJF. The pursuit of truth has been replaced with the pursuit of one faction’s preferred power dynamics. While this tendency has metastasized throughout our society (an example being that if I signed this email using my full name, I would undoubtedly lose my high-paying job due to the “harm” I cause to my peers with it), the battle over it should start and end in academia. The experiment done by Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, and James Lindsay where they managed to get bogus papers into prestigious journals, combined with the DEI litmus tests that weed out social-justice fundamentalism’s critics, mean that academia cannot be trusted.

Gary perceives double standards and urges procedural fairness:

Americans love the idea of fairness. Institutions lose trust because they are viewed as playing favorites. Institutions that want trust from the nation need to rise above the political fray and latest social-media frenzy. Well-publicized standards and transparent execution of processes are essential to trust. We seem to be lacking all of that currently.

Errol is disappointed in public-health officials and media outlets:

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William says the question doesn’t quite apply to him:

I guess I don’t really think about trust; I try to analyze a shifting web of facts, policies, and motivations and try to understand why things happen. Then if something happens that I don’t like, I don’t necessarily feel betrayed but more resigned.

Peggy shares her professional background:

I have trust in institutions because I was once part of the most trusted: the military. I spent 35 years in the Army. I understand the training and the values that we embrace when taking on the mission. These things inculcate trust. The idea that suddenly people aren’t to be trusted is a fantasy––a willful, petulant, childish fantasy wrought by people who have everything. Journalists go to J-school to learn standards and their editors, supervisors, and fact-checkers hold them to account. Judges and lawyers go to law school where the Constitution, the laws, and their peers hold them to account. Officers and noncommissioned officers go to military-leadership schools designed to maintain readiness, and that includes diversity training because experts in readiness say it’s important to understand each other if we are to fight and win wars. And then our Uniform Code of Military Justice holds us to account.

The broadcast media, the internet, social media, and other permission structures have led the masses to distrust institutions. Our billion-dollar outrage machines pander to intellectual toddlers in order to make money. What don’t those things have? Standards and accountability.

WJM has similar frustrations:

Yes, I have a lot of trust in governmental institutions. What I don’t trust is the people that make it their mission to erode this trust by weakening those institutions to make them seem ineffective and counter to popular will, thus making a self-fulfilling prophecy of their decline.

Andrew is pessimistic about the future:

My faith in American institutions has never been lower. Like the printing press before, the communication revolution of social media has continued to chip away at the old paradigm where information was disseminated from leaders down to their constituents. Now misinformation spreads like wildfire across platforms and leaders are forced to indulge the passions of the mob. The printing press ignited a century of warfare in Europe and I fear that social media will continue to have a similar destabilizing effect in our current era.

Gordon, however, is optimistic:

I have about the same trust in our institutions as 10 years ago. Our nation has gone through a great test these past six years. And it has withstood all challenges. Today our nation better realizes that the voters are the ones in charge. Also, due to those recent challenges, office holders, bureaucrats, and people serving in the military are all more aware of the oaths they took: to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I think by the end of next year, after the election results are in, this nation will be more unified and its positive feelings about institutions will be even stronger.

RS felt cynical about institutions for a long time, but two things changed that:

First, air travel. It’s gotten safer and safer year after year. When you reflect on how incredible air travel is—from planes to flight systems to air-traffic control to flight administration to FAA safety regulations—it’s an astonishing achievement. And if you think along these lines, you realize that a lot of institutions work really well.

Next: I’ve come to realize that so much of the mistrust we experience is because it serves political interests to make us feel bad all the time. Rage and fear fuel mistrust, which is used to propel us into action. Once you realize that, the mistrust begins to fade and you realize that a lot of things do in fact work, especially on the ground level. Criminals get caught. Doctors aren’t always beholden to drug companies. Deciding NOT to get manipulated into feeling bad helps one to see the things that do work, which are a lot.

John is down on SCOTUS:

I’m in my mid-70s and have experienced quite a number of events that could lead one to mistrust our national institutions, but until Mitch McConnell denied President Obama the ability to put a Supreme Court nominee before the full Senate for an up-or-down vote, I had felt that our federal justice system was trustworthy. During their confirmation hearings, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Kavanaugh, when asked about Roe v. Wade, answered [ambiguously] and then when the first opportunity came to overturn it, they did. I will not trust there will be a good-faith constitutional ruling from this Court as long as those three and Alito and Thomas (who should be impeached) are on the bench. I expect Congress and the president to be political, not the Supreme Court.

Ben is down on business:

I’ve become a lot more politically engaged in the last eight years, and I’m much more apt to be suspicious of American institutions based on how they act, rather than just trusting or distrusting them writ large. For example, I tend to get frustrated with “mainstream” news outlets for the way they cover the news sometimes, but that’s quite a bit different than mistrusting say, Fox News, when they were cheerfully spreading 2020 election misinformation. I tend to view government agencies like the DOD, FBI, and CIA favorably regardless of who sits in the White House, because they’re staffed by career professionals. But when they misbehave, I feel they should be held to account. By contrast, the DHS, which is a post-9/11 creature, has not in my view maintained the same standards of lawfulness and professionalism as its peer agencies.

But if there’s one American institution whose trust has “bottomed out” with me, that would be our business community. The movie Erin Brockovich came out 23 years ago, detailing a story about a California utility company that willfully poisoned a huge number of innocent Americans. In the decades that followed, it seems to me that American corporations have become more unaccountable, not less. Oil companies lying about climate change, tech companies lying about privacy and social harms, food manufacturers squeezing out safety precautions and devastating the farmers who rely on them—the list goes on.

The behavior of America’s 21st-century business community calls to mind the behavior of big monopolies in the early 20th century. It took some huge steps from labor activists and eventually the federal government to rein them in, and decades of deregulation, Borkian antitrust policy, lax campaign-finance laws, and overall consolidation seems to have returned us to the dynamics of that miserable era. I feel extremely firmly that this is the biggest systemic issue facing our country, and breaking up a very large number of these huge conglomerates would do an incalculable amount of good.

Ryan muses on living in interesting times:

The institutions held, just barely, in the face of Trump’s incompetent attempt to be an autocrat. That’s a point for trust. And yet the institution (or system) of our two parties is failing. A point against trust. While no one beyond the age of 10 years old could ever trust either party, both always spinning for their advantage, we now have a fully anti-democracy party that cannot help but degrade all other institutions, some more than others. One thing we can say with certainty is that things change. Are these the growing pains of a young democracy (which actually begins in practice with the end of Jim Crow)? Are these backlashes against institutions part of a cycle that exposes systemic racism and the vilification of poor people by (mostly) those who are trying to destroy our institutions? Is this anti-democracy party in its slow death throes, leading to an era where genuine common ground can be reached? The easy answer to the question you pose is obviously “less trust.” But have we not seen our current administration use institutions very effectively to create new laws that will actually help many people who need it and change the way we use energy (Inflation Reduction Act)?

So the answer is my trust is more fragile than 10 years ago, not less or more, because I can see very easily how our institutions could be completely destroyed in a matter of months, and yet I can also see how our institutions might be strengthened by enduring this period of great stress, and emerging with two (mostly) pro-democracy parties. I mean, the Cold War 2.0 has already begun. I wish there was a better motivating force (like saving the planet, ending needless suffering), but that very well might be what aligns people’s interests and shores up institutions in the near(ish) future.  

And Robin harkens back to the first viral video of police misconduct:

There used to be an adage that “seeing is believing.”  The day that notion died was March 3, 1991, over 32 years ago, when the LAPD were videoed beating up Rodney King … yet a subsequent jury found them not guilty. Since then there have been numerous examples of the public being disappointed and let down by institutions that they had always trusted: widespread sexual abuse throughout the Catholic Church, abuse within school systems, fraud on Wall Street and in the mismanagement of insurance and pension funds. I could go on, but, since 2016 and his arrival on the political scene, Donald Trump (and his many lies) has accelerated American delusion with just about everything, including the Supreme Court.

It’s fortunate that somebody filmed George Floyd being beaten up and justice was served. But the damage was done over 30 years ago and nothing has been the same since.

Back in 2014, I published “Video Killed Trust in Police Officers,” a thesis that held up well in ensuing years.

In the summer of 1999, when I was 16 years old, I remember walking to a train station in West London from a babysitting job when a 40-something man in a Range Rover pulled up, told me he was on television, and then announced to his young son (also in the car) that I was “Daddy’s new girlfriend.” I don’t know who the man was; I didn’t get in the car, not because I was afraid but because I’d just bought Californication for my minidisc player and wanted to listen to the album on the way home. But what he did wasn’t abnormal for the time. This was two years before the 35-year-old TV presenter and radio host Chris Evans (not the actor) married the 18-year-old pop star Billie Piper in Las Vegas, after a months-long relationship that started when he gave the teenager—so young, she hadn’t yet learned to drive—a Ferrari filled with roses. A year later, in 2002, the BBC Radio 1 host Chris Moyles offered, live on air, to take the singer Charlotte Church’s virginity on her 16th birthday, claiming that he could “lead her through the forest of sexuality” now that she was legal.

I’ve often wondered how Millennial women in Britain survived the aughts: not just the incessant fat shaming and the ritualized alcohol abuse, but also the cheerful, open predation that was everywhere in popular culture then. This weekend, the London Times and the TV documentary series Dispatches revealed coordinated allegations that the TV star turned conspiratorial wellness personality Russell Brand had victimized multiple people from 2006 to 2013, including a 16-year-old girl who says he picked her up on the street when he was 30, referred to her as “the child” and cradled her like a baby when he found out she was a virgin, and then later choked her with his penis until she—fearing she would actually suffocate—punched him in the stomach. The dual reports also allege that Brand raped a woman he knew at his home in Los Angeles and attempted to rape another until she screamed so hard that he flew into a rage. (Brand has said he “absolutely refutes” what he describes as “a litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks.”)

Beyond these serious allegations, there’s also recorded evidence, documented on TV comedy specials and on Brand’s own radio show during the 2000s, that Brand relentlessly harassed women he worked with, sexualizing and dehumanizing them on air, and then belittling them to the public when they objected. This was the particular insidiousness of aughts-era misogyny, which people like Brand propagated but absolutely didn’t invent: the idea that if girls, or young women, complained about how they were being treated, they were joyless scolds, too uncool to get the joke and too ugly to be concerned about anyway.

[Read: Why were we so cruel to Britney Spears?]

The trap was that women were expected to cheerfully participate in their own objectification or risk being not just exploited but also vilified. It was an ethos informed by porn and disseminated by a new stable of men’s magazines. In 1999, when I was trying to decide where to go to college, a naked image of the children’s-television presenter Gail Porter was projected onto the Houses of Parliament without Porter’s knowledge or consent in a stunt by the magazine FHM, inadvertently saying volumes about what kind of status girls my age could actually hope for. Why bother investing in an education or a career when the dominant cultural paradigm was interested only in sexual power? And the messaging worked. By 2006, according to Natasha Walter’s book Living Dolls, more than half of British girls polled in one survey said they would consider nude modeling. The previous year, female students at Pembroke College, Cambridge, posed topless for their student magazine. Out of 11 female cast members from the 2006 season of the hit British reality show Big Brother, four posed topless after leaving the show, to capitalize on their new notoriety.

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Russell Brand had his own Big Brother connection, hosting a spin-off talk-show series about the British franchise, or that the toxic influencer Andrew Tate—currently charged in Romania with rape and sex trafficking, charges that Tate denies—also appeared on the show. Reality television from its conception relied on two things: provocation and exposure. People watched to see who would fight, who would hook up, who would crack under the pressure. The medium demanded ratings, and ratings came from finding not average people to sequester in a TV goldfish bowl, but extreme personalities who craved their own 24-hour soapbox and the promise of instant notoriety. Sex has always been the subtext of the series—I vividly remember the tabloid press’s frame-by-frame analysis in 2004 when two Big Brother contestants supposedly became the first people to have intercourse on the show. (By way of encouragement, and to emphasize how invested people were in this new television frontier, Playboy TV offered a £50,000 prize at the time to anyone bold enough to do so.)

And so Big Brother was a natural forum for Brand. The Dispatches documentary shows him pulling his trousers down while sitting on a female interviewee’s lap, and running down the street after a man in urine-soaked underwear asking for a “cuddle,” among other antics—employing blatant, aggressive sexuality as his defining comedic mode. He was so open about who he was—writing about his heroin addiction and sex addiction in his memoir, flaunting his status as a sex pest on TV, and later in movies—that it’s astonishing now to see how much he actually seems to have gotten away with. Since the Times and Dispatches reporting emerged, attention has focused on internal inquiries from the BBC (where Brand had a radio show from 2005 to 2008) and Channel 4, which hosted Big Brother, to examine whether complaints about Brand were made at the time. But this feels rather beside the point given how much evidence already exists in the public domain. Brand’s raptorial sexuality was his personality, his unique selling point, and for a very long time he was handsomely rewarded for it. If people really want to reckon with the legacy of such strikingly recent cultural misogyny, in other words, it’s best not to comfort themselves too soon with the idea that Brand was in any way an anomaly.

The police watchdog is to review how Greater Manchester Police handled Andrew Malkinson's case.

My most vivid memories of my early years at sleepaway camp, when I was 10 and 11, focus on the bizarre institution of color war. The campers were divided randomly in half for a wide-ranging competition between teams defined around no common identity, status, experience, or prior allegiance—just pure partisan competition. For one entire day, half of my bunkmates and possibly one or both of my brothers would become the sworn opposition. Despite knowing these divisions were both temporary and arbitrary, I engaged in the competition with the utmost seriousness—in relay races, basketball games, and whatever else was on the packed schedule.

At day’s close, two climactic showdowns involved the whole camp, each team gathered on opposite sides of a ball field. The first competition required us to shout self-congratulatory cheers; the victory was awarded to the team that impressed the judges as louder and, thus, more spirited. I would scream myself hoarse. The finale, a tug-of-war, relied less on an umpire’s subjective assessment. We lined up alongside a massive rope stretched across the field and pulled with all our collective might. I can still picture the anchor of my team during one of those summers, a stout boy with a low center of gravity from the oldest age group, wrapping himself with the far end of our rope, his face red from the strain. I also remember the magical feeling, after what seemed like an endless and titanic effort, when the rope began to edge slowly but decisively in our direction.

In both of those contests, my excitement and my motivation to compete rose in proportion to the size of the team I was on, despite the fact that team size was precisely what made my own contribution so much less likely to matter. This is one of the paradoxes of team competition.

Often, I recall the image of the tug-of-war, and the attendant illusion that my cheers or my exertions on the rope were making a meaningful contribution to victory, when I face an impending election season. The parallel is striking: In mass democracies, voters deliberate and agonize over their actions, exert themselves, and trumpet their allegiances, even though they understand rationally that their individual support is wildly unlikely to determine the outcome. The larger the electorate, the less our votes count. And yet we turn out most consistently when the electorate is largest, and we recall most vividly those Election Days when our votes made the least practical difference.

[Larry Schwartztol: The best way to protect elections from partisan manipulation]

In modern political life, the act of individual voting, conducted in privacy and unfettered by external constraints and pressures, is the hallmark of a democratic society. It’s most of what we mean by democracy. This one occasional exercise bears the heavy burden of representing (or even exhausting) the capacity of ordinary individuals to determine their political circumstances and participate in self-government. But it is also an exercise in which individual choices and actions hardly appear to count at all. The more ostensibly democratic a society—the more widely suffrage is extended or the more robust the turnout on Election Day—the more we as voters ought to feel effectively disenfranchised.

From the perspective of moral and political philosophy, the predicament of the individual voter in a mass election is a type of collective-action problem. Voters might be adhering to some categorical imperative to act as they wish others to do—much as they feel obligated to boycott unsavory business practices, forgo benefit from animal cruelty, or sort their recycling—even when they don’t expect their individual act to have any practical impact, and even when they could simply become free riders on the boycotts or recycling efforts of others.

I imagine that there are voters out there for whom such philosophical considerations come into play, reassuring them or even animating them. Likely for others, the mere possibility (reinforced by the occasional example from a local election) that an outcome could be determined by the action of one voter provides enough motivation. But more commonly, voters adopt other strategies to augment the puny power of our individual ballot. They may try to persuade others to vote, or to vote a certain way, and donate money to organizations that will try to mobilize or influence multiple voters. (For many Americans, and not just the wealthy and incorporated, individual donations have supplanted individual votes as expressions of voter preference and mechanisms for participating in electoral politics.) Others try to maximize the effects of their votes by registering, if they can legally do so, in competitive districts or smaller states where the odds of casting a single decisive straw might be marginally higher. I myself have done all of these things.

These efforts resemble shouting louder or pulling harder at the end of color war; they are desperate attempts to be more than just a solitary voice or a lone body in the massive crowd. But what I recall from those childhood experiences is less some concern about the size of my contribution than the attraction and excitement of belonging to such a large, competitive undertaking. Similarly, for many voters, the sense of participating in a huge partisan battle, more than anything else, may make them feel (typically with the help of some magical thinking) that their votes count.

U.S. party politics offers voters this kind of opportunity. Though partisan remains a slur in our political discourse, partisan feelings are as powerful and pervasive in this country today as at any point in the past century. Despite the current disrepute and relative weakness of the major party organizations, party-line voting is on the rise. Large aggregate shifts in partisan vote from one election to another within communities and regions have become so uncommon that we speak with confidence of red and blue states or counties. Notwithstanding misgivings about the two parties, most U.S. voters gravitate to one of two teams, even if they register as independent. And the competition between those teams fully structures and conditions U.S. politics.

The history of this development is deep and complex. Not all democracies have two-party systems, and nothing in the U.S. Constitution mandates parties at all—most of the Founders abhorred factionalism and expected the new republic to avoid party formation. As ideological differences within George Washington’s cabinet crystallized, though, parties quickly formed, and we’ve had some version of them ever since. But the modern two-party system, with national competition, grassroots organization, and intense loyalty, emerged in the early 1830s. It was initiated by Martin Van Buren when he built the Democratic Party around the presidency of Andrew Jackson—while Jackson’s opponents followed suit and created their own rival organization, the Whigs. Over the next decade, party labels became what they have been ever since: core forms of identity, usually passed down from generation to generation, connecting masses of strangers to one another well beyond a single election season. By 1847, a Whig editor could describe partisanship as the animating emotional force in American electoral politics. With party divisions, he wrote, “pride, emulation, the desire of distinction, the contagious sympathy with numbers, and that disguised form of self-love, the esprit de corps, all concur to swell the tide of feeling, until the desire of party success becomes the master passion of the human breast.” Not patriotism, honor, or sense of justice, but rather partisan desire.

Van Buren defended his two-party system (which he claimed was simply a revival of an ideological division that had always existed) on broader grounds, but a crucial consideration was his desire to forestall sectional division and protect the institution of slavery. His system took shape against the backdrop of Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia, Britain’s abolition of slavery in the West Indies, the beginnings of radical abolitionism in the U.S. North, and other warning signs in the early 1830s of a political threat to the practice of slaveholding. Without competition between two national parties, Van Buren wrote, “geographical divisions founded on local interests or, what is worse prejudices between free & slaveholding states will inevitably take their place.” Around the figure of Jackson, a slaveholding southerner who appealed to northern and western voters on other grounds, Van Buren built a Democratic Party dominated by defenders of slavery while effectively forcing Jackson’s opponents to organize against him on a nationwide basis, giving them incentives to avoid slavery politics altogether.

Van Buren’s system achieved its objectives for a couple of decades, until it collapsed into civil war. But the culture of partisan competition that Van Buren had championed outlived both the political crisis that it was designed to avert and the institution it was intended to protect. Despite realignments leading up to the war and a massive influx of new voters in its aftermath, intense two-party competition soon settled back into familiar antebellum patterns and continued to structure American politics. Democrats and Republicans nominated candidates, framed policy debates, motivated and disciplined voters, and furnished the very ballots with which the right of suffrage was exercised. Voters saw elections (on most occasions) as a choice between two parties and experienced Election Day as a contest between two powerful teams. Van Buren’s hopes that national parties would produce sectional harmony had been dashed, but his vision of those parties animating and mobilizing masses of ordinary men as they went to the polls endured.

In the early 20th century, however, the major political parties suffered a heavy blow. Progressive reformers, with the support of big-business interests, introduced neutral ballots, private voting, direct election of senators, ballot initiatives, the professionalized civil service, and other core features of modern U.S. politics. These reforms, along with more high-profile crusades for immigration restriction, the banning of alcohol, and women’s suffrage, all had the intended effect of diminishing the power of political parties over electoral outcomes and limiting their control over public policy. The adjective partisan acquired ever more negative connotations, and parties became institutions from which the democratic process needed to be protected.

And yet the two-party system persisted. Despite additional realignments over the past century, nationwide competition between Republicans and Democrats still structures and constrains both elections and government policy to a degree that sets the United States apart from many other nations. Control of the presidency, Congress, and every state legislature in the country is determined by an electoral contest between the two major parties. Third parties and independent candidacies remain at least as marginal today as they were before the Progressive reforms.

Just as significant, the passions of partisan identification that first appeared in the decades before the Civil War are alive and well in our political culture. Modern parties may have been designed in large part around the abortive and discredited goal of avoiding a reckoning over slavery, and they flourished in an era when electoral politics was a male privilege and voting a display of masculinity, but almost two centuries and many constitutional amendments later, partisan competition continues to fulfill one of its other original purposes: It enables a mass electorate to feel emotionally connected to and invested in democratic government.

[From the 2008 issue: The case for partisanship]

Ordinary American voters today proclaim their passionate investments from their virtual rooftops, and generally behave more like sports fans than like jurors: They boldly predict results, wager money, emblazon other people’s names on their chest and property, bask in the reflected glory of their candidates’ victories, and occasionally cut off reflected failure by disowning the losing side or blaming someone on the team for the loss. The sports fans they resemble are neither the hobbyists who follow athletic spectacles for entertainment’s sake or to acquire and display expertise, nor the hooligans who take the action on the field as license to enact other kinds of violent antagonism, but rather the partisan fans who root deeply for one team and imagine their support as somehow part of the competition.

This sense of belonging to a political team, a fundamentally abstract but variously embodied entity whose successes and failures reflect the efforts of individual voters and supporters, does lots of emotional work around elections. Some observers might see it as evidence of the trivialization of politics as spectator sport. Others might lament a distressing tribalization in American life. I’m more sympathetic. A democratic process with hundreds of millions of participants is daunting and potentially disempowering. Recognizing our individual efforts in a mass election as part of a team project, as so many American voters have done in the past, is not purely spectatorial and is not purposelessly tribal. It is a reasonable means (perhaps even a necessary means) of motivating the forms of participation that mass elections, by definition, both require and discourage. We are all more likely to vote, donate, and otherwise contribute to the outcomes of elections when we feel like part of a team. Imagining ourselves tugging on the massive rope that extends across the country in November requires a bit of magical thinking, but that might be what our political system demands and rewards. And in the 21st century, with the differences between the two parties so stark and significant and the stakes of these partisan contests so grave, we desperately need that kind of thinking.

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