For nearly one hundred years America has been center-right politically. We have soundly rejected -isms of extreme right and left. Democracy in America was stable, no vacillation between communism and fascism every four years. American political scientists concluded that democracy produces political stability. They took those facts and constructed a theory to explain them, rather than construct the theory and test it against the facts. It becomes self-referential, tautological, when you do it the way they did.

It was the "gas station" theory. The thinking was by analogy: Let's say you want to open a gas station somewhere on this map.

                                      

Where are you going to put it, on the far end of Left or Right Avenue? Way up on North Street or down on South Street? Of course not. You're going to put your gas station as close to that intersection as you can, where the traffic converges. Democracy produces a large middle of individuals with closely similar interests; politically they vary by a degree or two from election to election, not ninety degrees. It is true that a society that swings from pole to pole politically, or one that can't make up its mind, "Let's see, the Communists or the Nazis this time?" is doomed. Thus American political scientists developed the theory to fit that grid: American politics was always and ever shall be a battle over the middle, amen.

Trumpism--populism? authoritarianism? nationalism? personality cult?--is a diagonal cutting across the political grid, like an interstate highway that is built over and obsoletes the old avenues and streets underneath. 

“Usually when we’re at parity we’re bunched up in the middle — now we’ve got parity but with extreme polarity.”-Haley Barbour, Republican.

Mr. Barbour means extreme left and right. That's the false paradigm that Trump and Republicans peddled during the election. It is increasingly being adopted by those in the middle (Barbour's quote is taken from an article today in the New York Times which promotes the paradigm.). It is not true. Joe Biden was nominated by the Democrats, not Bernie Sanders. Joe Biden is president-elect, not Sanders. 

The divide along that diagonal is democratic at one end and undemocratic at the other. We are at parity, Haley Barbour is correct there! Trump won 306 electoral votes in 2016; Biden 306 in 2020. 81.2M voted for democracy in 2020; 74.2M for undemocracy. 

The diagonal is segmented. It is not a continuum, not one highway. The two segments are not "bunched up in the middle" as the two political parties were on the old grid. The two segments are incommensurable, with their own information loci, even their own coded communication not fully intelligible to the other; they go off in entirely different directions and they do not intersect. They don't appeal to the same voters, only to their respective segments. You can't get from one segment to the other. 

You can't get to Democracy Way from Undemocracy Drive. Democracy in America will continue only if undemocratic people change their minds in time and agree to democratic ways and means again.