Why neither covid-19 nor the assault on US democracy has sparked national unity or institutional change | No. 181 — January 30, 2022

Tying two strains together

Here is the best chart I saw this week. I think it tells a powerful story, which we’ll get to in a second.

Now, “best chart of the week” sounds like a high bar, but that’s really because I’ve been coding a lot for an upcoming project and haven’t seen many charts! But this one is still really good. I digress…

The chart comes from this New York Times piece by Thomas Edsall. In it, Edsall pulls together extracts from interviews with political scientists (his usual, useful format) and asks: “Why did the national emergency brought about by the Covid pandemic not only fail to unite the country, but instead provoke the exact opposite development, further polarization?” I would add a few other events/dynamics that have failed to produce the expected positive outcome: the January 6th insurrection and profound increase in housing prices over the last decade.

Edsall quotes Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton, who says that “Covid seems to be the almost ideal polarizing crisis…

… It wa…