From a story on Persuasion by Francis Fukuyama headlined “Paths to Depolarization”:

Polarization—the sharp division of American society between red and blue—is the single greatest weakness of the United States as a country today. We face many challenges at present, over inflation, racial and gender inequality, crime, drug use, climate change, immigration, and the like, and all of these issues become harder if not impossible to solve if Americans fundamentally do not trust one another and seek to block any solution offered by the other side. This weakness is well understood by enemies like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who has done everything he can to widen those divisions and has acted geopolitically at a moment when he thought the U.S. was too weak and self-preoccupied to respond effectively.