Church & state

From 1940 to 2000 — through rock ’n’ roll, through the sexual revolution — an eerily stable 70-ish per cent of Americans belonged to a church. From the millennium, that share started collapsing to what is now less than half.

Janan Ganesh in FT. He’s trying to reason through why every US election ends up 50/50.

The stabilisation of the west after 1945 is really a story of dominant parties, such as the Conservatives in the UK, the Christian Democrats in Germany, the right in France and to some extent the Democrats in the US, who ran Congress for much of the second half of the 20th century. The ascendant party could afford to be magnanimous, while the other had every incentive to appeal beyond its base. Veering too far from the centre brought Goldwater-style annihilation. Competition between equals is beautiful in theory. In practice? Well, how edifying have you found the past couple of decades?

(is that true?)