In my opinion, it's because the two party divide has reached the point of extremism on both sides, and extremists act on emotion rather than logic or reason. Up until a couple of decades ago, they both did a good job of keeping their more extreme members out of sight and mind. Now they're embracing and amplifying them.

I really find the state of American (but not only) politics dreadful where everything is seen under the lenses of conservatives vs liberals.

Most people I know, everywhere in the world have mixed views on most topics.

Let alone the fact that ideologies tend to change, modern rights are way more populist and economically-socialist than they were 2 decades ago. See Poland, Hungary, Italy, etc, where governments make money fall on the poorest, on the elderly, etc ignoring their historical electorate (middle class).

Protectionism may work in some cases, but even when it works, it works by making things more expensive. People don't buy American cars because it's cheaper to make similar cars in Mexico. Fine, so let's force companies to make cars in America. It's now more expensive (otherwise we won't be importing from Mexico in the first place).

You add more and more protectionism, it may get some jobs back, but the price is that things get more and more expensive. And not by a few percent, more like by 50% or more. (Just think of how much money an American worker needs to have an ordinary middle-class life compared to a Mexican worker.)

Now consider how much people were angry over the Covid-era inflation and how it was a major factor in Trump coming back (and looks like it's going to be a major factor in Republicans losing the mid-term election this year). Nobody wants prices to go up. Americans say they want protectionism but what they want is a fairy tale protectionism where jobs comes back but prices magically stay stable. It cannot happen, and if the choice is between some other group of Americans in Michigan getting better jobs and you getting your SUV at a "reasonable" price, people will choose the latter. (I'm not digging at Americans - the same is going to happen everywhere.)

It's basically "It's extremely hard to defeat capitalism at its own game." Nobody likes capitalism, but that doesn't mean you'll get popular by defying capitalism.

liberal base is in theory pro-union and pro-worker, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who suggests economic discrimination in favor of native-born industries and workers.

Well, yes, because discrimination on the basis of where someone was born is illegal. The American liberal base is, and has always been, fine with economic discrimination in favor of those in America (without regard to where they were born or their residency status).

> The conservative base is unfriendly to foreigners and foreign cultures, and claims to prefer American-made goods and services, but will immediately guillotine any internal party member who causes consumer prices to raise substantially--which they would have to do in order to support American workers creating products rather than our offshored counterparts.

Currently, the head of the party is raising and lowering tariffs at will, so I don't quite think this holds anymore.

Excellent analysis.