When all the pull is only to one direction (and of course it happens on the left a lot, too)

Allow me to again recommend this book.

Here's the important bit: For anthropological, biological reasons, liberals have to be convinced to follow a political party while conservatives have to be convinced not to. Liberals hate the Clintons because they're hypocrites; conservatives are untroubled by hypocrisy. Any liberal argument you've ever witnessed has been some form of "REASONS!" while every conservative argument you've ever witnessed has been some form of "TEAM!"

None of this shit is binary, though. There's a spectrum of liberal-to-conservative thought and liberal-to-conservative political affinity but, in the words of Jon Stewart, "American politics is determined by the extremes because the people in the middle have better shit to do." If you're willing to blow a day standing in front of a Planned Parenthood with a poster of an aborted fetus on a stick, I know two things about you: (1) we don't vote the same (2) you feel much stronger about this than I do.

Now add the fact that running for Congress costs an average of over a million dollars (for a job with a salary of $174k) and the perversions become clear.

And I mean, I'm guilty. Apparently I bought one half of a useless Amy McGrath vote in 2020. If you don't have national attention, you will lose. And for a local politician to earn national attention, you either have to be Marjorie Taylor Greene or be running against Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The mechanism that I hope saves us is that the sane will care more than the crazy. That's the only way we ended up with Raphael Warnock.