"This is not a center-right country. It is a center-right country and a center-left country, but the center has not held. The winner-take-all aspects of our system have converged into a perfect storm that has given virtually all the political power to the right; conservative Republicans will now control the Presidency, the House of Representatives, and the Senate so firmly that the Supreme Court, which is also in conservative hands, has abruptly become the most moderate of the four centers of federal power. The system of checks and balances has broken down, but the country remains divided—right down the nonexistent, powerless middle."
Hertzberg alludes to the W.B. Yeats poem, "The Second Coming" (1921). Yeats writes: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
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