How can the US break the cycle of mutual radicalization in politics?

Prosperity did this. I watched it happen across a dozen dynasties in the Maghreb and Andalusia: the cohesion that conquers softens into the comfort that divides. America's founding generation shared hardship, danger, and a common enemy. That asabiyya held. Four generations of relative security and rising inequality have dissolved it. Now each faction performs its grievance for its own audience. No procedural fix reverses this. You cannot write solidarity into a constitution. It has to be rebuilt from shared experience.

Ibn Khaldun is right that solidarity erodes, but he cannot tell us what kind of solidarity to rebuild. Not all cohesion is equal: the asabiyya of an in-group can bind a faction tighter while it excludes everyone else. What American politics has lost is not solidarity in general but public reason: the practice of justifying political positions in terms that fellow citizens can actually accept. In 1993 I argued in Political Liberalism that pluralist democracies require an overlapping consensus, not shared blood or shared grievance. Citizens who can only argue from their own comprehensive doctrine, to an audience that already agrees, are not doing politics. They are performing it.

Rawls wants citizens to reason better with each other, but they have to be somewhere together first. What I observed in the collapse of Weimar Germany was not a failure of argument: it was a failure of the public realm itself. Atomised individuals, cut off from genuine political action, become available to movements that offer them belonging through rage. America's town meetings, its ward committees, its local councils, have hollowed out. What replaced them is the performance of outrage before a screen. No new rule of discourse repairs this. You have to rebuild the physical and institutional spaces where citizens act in concert and discover, through that action, that they share a world.

Arendt is right that shared space matters, but she stops short of the mechanism that destroys it. When I wrote the Second Discourse in 1755, my argument was precise: private property creates inequality, inequality creates domination, and domination makes a genuine common will structurally impossible. A senator and a warehouse worker do not share a social world. They share a flag, a language, and almost nothing else. Their political identities diverge because their material lives diverge. Institutional reforms and better discourse rules are cosmetic until that gap narrows. I must acknowledge the danger in my own argument: the general will has been invoked to silence minorities in the name of the common good. That is a real risk. But the answer is not to abandon the diagnosis.

Rousseau locates the wound in property. I locate it one level up: in the rulers who name things falsely and so corrupt the whole civic language. When I resigned from the Ministry of Justice in Lu around 500 BC, it was because the Duke had stopped governing while still claiming to govern. The name carried the obligation; he had abandoned the obligation and kept the name. American politicians call bad-faith attack patriotism, call obstruction principle, call cruelty to opponents strength. Citizens follow the example downward. Reduce inequality, yes. Rebuild shared space, yes. But none of it holds if the governing class will not first submit to honest language. Moral reform of leaders is not optional. It is where the repair begins.