This isn’t at all surprising. We’ve basically abandoned the societal shared vision of prosperity and building for future generations.

There are no more heroes, no more examples that drive our aspirations. We’re a mess of silos, struggles, and reactionary movements.

I admire those of us that are trying to hold the middle for sanity and stability but things don’t seem like they’re moderating any time soon.

It may be easier to hold the middle in countries that also have actual middle-whatever political parties. (which would seem to require having more than 2?)

But note well that TFA argues that, upon analysis, the silos do not appear to be as strongly separated as earlier reported.

tl;dr the FT/HN reported data may have flaws; based on a slightly different data set TFA finds:

- Since the 1990s, both men and women have become more likely to identify as liberal.

- Women are more likely to identify as liberal by 5-10 percentage points.

- There is no evidence that the ideology gap is growing.

(in particular for the last point, TFA points out the wide error bands resulting from noisy data)