It seems, maybe, that President Donald Trump has abandoned his policy of separating children from their immigrant parents and warehousing them in detention facilities. But the conflict over the policy has been, among other things, starkly clarifying.
The cruelty, accompanied by the lies deployed to excuse it, further inflamed political passions and sharpened the divide between Republicans, who support the president, and Democrats, who detest him.
It feels as though another political Rubicon was crossed.
"I think we're at the beginning of a soft civil war," political scientist Thomas Schaller said in a telephone interview. "I don't know if the country gets out of it whole."
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For years, Republicans have led the way in breaking rules — from taking the national debt hostage to usurping a Supreme Court seat. In a 2016 poll, almost three-quarters of Trump supporters, a group marked by grievances, agreed that the country needed a leader who would "break some rules," as did 57 percent of Republicans overall. Only 41 percent of Democrats agreed.
But Democrats can tire of rules, too. Lots of rules, after all, don't do Democrats any favors. The past two Republican presidencies were a product of the Electoral College, that useless appendix of American politics, overriding the popular vote. The Senate favors rural states over representative democracy.