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Article: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-hatred-negative-partisanship-came-to-dominate-american-politics/

There's nothing here that's necessarily new from the other partisanship authoritarianism threats to democracy topics I've posted in the past, but I thought this was a better summarization. The tldr is that people see "the other side" as a threat to their values, the nation, and their own well-being, and that it presents a danger that both sides may come to prefer a dictatorship ran by their side than a republic that's occasionally ran by the other side. The article explicitly states that "extreme partisan animosity is a prelude to democratic collapse".

If all of this seems unsustainable, it should. The current levels of hyper-partisanship are clearly dangerous. It’s bad news for a democracy when 60 to 70 percent of people view fellow citizens of the other party as a serious threat. And the more the parties continue to unify their supporters by casting the other party as the enemy, the higher this number will rise.