Welcome to the commentary magazine podcast today is Thursday, August 2nd, 2018.

I'm John Pauhr, it's the editor of commentary with me as always a dream all our senior editor high aide.

Hi John, Noah Rothman, our associate at our high Noah, and Sarabha Mari, our senior writer,

Hi Sarab.

Hi John.

Commentary the 70 odd year old monthly of intellectual analysis, political,

property and cultural criticism from a conservative perspective.

Join us at commentarymagazine.com for a few free reads and then you are obliged morally

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including your beautiful monthly magazine in your mailbox 11 times a year.

So guys, we want to pull back, do one of our pull up to 30,000 feet and try to survey the political,

cultural and social landscape of the United States and bring up an interesting question,

which is, is there a center in American politics and American life anymore?

By which I mean Donald Trump is a polarizing president and in response to his polarization,

Democrats themselves are polarizing in the opposite direction.

Interesting stat that came out this week asking, or last week asking Americans about Republican and

Democratic candidates, if the views of the candidates of the Republican and Democratic parties were

in or out of the mainstream and for the first time, basically there are equivalent numbers that

33% of voters say that Republicans are in the mainstream and about 33% of voters say that Democrats

in the mainstream and in each case 56 to 58% of those pulled say that each party's candidates are

out of the mainstream of American life. So that was from an NBC News Wall Street Journal

...