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Ezra Klein

By Ezra Klein

Opinion Columnist

Imagine telling yourself, in 2012, that just three presidential elections into the future Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Alberto Gonzales, Barbara Lee and Elizabeth Warren would be endorsing the same candidate. Such is the strange breadth of Kamala Harris’s coalition: a popular front united not by shared policy goals but by a shared defense of American institutions.

The breadth of Trump’s coalition is different: It stretches from anti-corporate naturalists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who says Trump has promised him “control” of public health agencies — to post-liberal Catholics like JD Vance to crypto bros to Elon Musk. This, too, is a coalition with vast policy differences. They are united by a shared distrust in — and desire to take control of — American institutions.

We’re used to elections pitting Democrats against Republicans. This election pits Guardians against Counterrevolutionaries.

Steven Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, described it to me like this: We normally think of America as polarized across a left-right ideological divide. This was the axis of political polarization in 2012: The parties were divided on Obamacare and tax rates and austerity. Republicans said they represented America’s entrepreneurial makers against the Democratic coalition built around the indolent 47 percent who paid no income tax and lived off the government. Democrats painted Mitt Romney as a rapacious private equity firm that had taken temporary human form.

That left-right divide on economics persists: Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House, just said he’d prioritize uprooting Obamacare. But it’s not the divide that matters most in this election. After all, Trump has repeatedly (and falsely) bragged on the campaign trail about saving Obamacare. Other traditional ideological divisions are more present: To the extent the election is about any one policy issue, it’s about abortion, and there the stakes are undeniable.

But there’s another axis that politics can polarize along: the basic worth of institutions. To Democrats, the institutions that govern American life, though flawed and sometimes captured by moneyed interests, are fundamentally trustworthy. They are repositories of knowledge and expertise, staffed by people who do the best work they can, and they need to be protected and........

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