Disintegrate

Drawing on Cas Mudde’s work, The Atlantic writes:

"The inconclusive results suggest that the most significant trend in Western democracies at the moment might not be the rise and fall of populist nationalism. Instead, it is arguably the disintegration of political parties. The story here is less about which specific type of politician people want to be represented by than about a crisis of democratic representation altogether. … what’s new is that the major mainstream parties aren’t so major anymore, and the minor fringe parties are no longer irrelevant. …

The United States is experiencing many of the same “inputs into the system” that European countries are, according to Best. The country’s two major parties are institutionally weak, and a growing number of Americans are identifying as political independents. American democracy is beset by political polarization and distrust of political institutions."

And: “If the United States had been transported into the Dutch political system, Best said, the result of last year’s U.S. election would likely have mirrored the Dutch result: “the second-largest party [would have been] a radical right-wing populist party.”"