Andrew Sullivan

And he refuses to do that.

And so has really created and stirred up a polarization that was there before him, no question.

But he's made a lot worse and I think a lot uglier than it ever had to be.

And I worry about the consequences of that for our culture going forward.

I also think just one other thing before I... is that the use of the presidency has now become this...

extraordinarily powerful tool in American politics in a way that it has been getting that way for the last century.

But the idea that we're gonna have successive

individual strongmen coming in from either party or whichever and doing whatever they want in Congress being somewhat irrelevant and the court being very marginal.

That's also not completely new, but he's taken it to a new level and I think it's a bad thing.

Well, liberal democracy depends upon people of different perspectives being able to have some kind of conversation that isn't simply yelling.

I mean, I'm thinking right now of yesterday's hearings with Bondi.

I've never seen it.

Well, occasionally, but the hearing there was just a fighting match in which insults were slung across the aisle.

There was no good faith.

There was insults in both directions, the sense that a representative of an executive branch should pay deference to the legislators, at least in a formal way, except they have a role in subjecting the executive to scrutiny.

And the executive shouldn't just simply respond to that by insulting them.

Maybe they went over the top too.

That's what happens in this dynamic.

But if we can't

communicate with each other, if we can actually have a conversation that respects the other individual in some way, you could disagree with them on everything, but still treat them like a decent person, then I think we'd lose the capacity for having a democracy altogether.