> but merely good enough to enable improvements via the Civil Right movement, gay power, womens lib, labor unions, etc

The rulings underpinning several of these are called out as "up next" by Thomas' concurring opinion.

I am neither Republican or Democrat. I am Brazilian and moderate. But I would not go as far as saying any party is a threat. In society, all changes that were made too fast resulted in unexpected consequences. We might be in times of extreme polarization, but in general, having opposing views in politics forcing changes to be slower than the Democrats would want and faster than what Republicas would, benefit us all in the end.

I would argue that the US is suffering from an inability to legislate due to the polarization. The two parties do not share the same idea of what problems we have, and they are not arguing over how to fix them. You have one side saying we should do something about global warming and the cost of education and gun deaths and the other side saying women should submit to their husbands and gays are causing social breakdown in the country and the Democrats are drinking the blood of children to live longer.

The Senate allows a minority to stop the majority from tweaking the laws in an iterative process, and holds the society back from doing things that require laws, like carbon tax or cap n trade, or even fixing clear bugs in ACA. We don’t have much internet relevant laws passed in the last twenty years, yet the internet and its conflicts have changed quite a lot since Napster. We can’t change the law to let people rebuild flood destroyed buildings on higher ground. All we do is tweak the budget numbers and appoint judges. It makes prospective solutions extremely tilted compared to even a good compromise of a law.

This is the problem with politics today in America. Republicans win by saying No to everything, while everyone collectively loses because of our inability to get anything done. And then Democrats get blamed for it anyway, whether it was their legislation or not.

When you believe God is on your side, you can justify almost any behavior to accomplish your goals, functional democracy be damned.

Gott mit uns (God is with us), as the Nazis put it

We are just stalled as a society. Brazil is quite similar. All the legislators are having a lot of problem moving forward in either direction. This is not a problem with the system and it is not one party to take the blame alone.

Until people find the middle ground or convince the other side, being stalled is not the worst solution. Dictatorship, civil war, and most other alternatives are worst than stalling legislation.

Take carbon tax as an example. I myself believe human action is destroying the environment and I want to reverse it. But I do not think carbon tax is the way, and I know many moderates on the same position as I am. How about removing all incentives first before imposing punishment? How about triple the nuclear plants, that are safer than never with newer tech, and make it impossible financially to justify carbon based electricity generation? There are dozens of ways to take the first steps without punishing people and getting more money in the government hands. Carbon tax is just shifting money from one hand to the other, and other bad actors will do something bad with it. I prefer to fix this with less money and less power to governments. And there you go. Better stalled than move forward in the wrong direction.

That is claim with zero backing. The center between any two arguments is not some superior choice because it’s between the two sides.

If two wolves and a sheep are deciding on lunch would the sheep consider only having two legs eaten a better deal for everyone?

It is more a wolf against wolf situations than wolf versus sheep situation. We are all humans and we can all reason and have conversations. In a democracy with two opposing parties we are way better off than in Russia. There you have a wolves versus sheep situation, with all the sheep with leadership mindset already eaten over generations.