Bitterness In Divided America

The brute partisanship plaguing the United States Senate is a symptom of a much larger national contagion. To the right and left alike, the recent fight over a Supreme Court nominee appears less like a final spasm of division — a sobering trauma, followed by calm resolution — than an event that deepens the national mood of turbulence. America is gripped by a climate of division and distrust rivaled by few other moments in the recent past.

Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, helped speed Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s embattled nomination toward a vote, but not before he declared that the Senate was approaching “rock bottom.” Mr. Grassley, 85 and a senator for nearly four decades, said it was time for “mending things so we can do things in a collegial way, that the United States Senate ought to do.”

That sentiment, from a lawmaker who fiercely defended Judge Kavanaugh and helped block President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Merrick B. Garland, drew scorn from many in the political world.

Historic grievances around race and gender are surfacing under a president who is dismissive of the concept of national unity. His political base celebrates the combative way in which he has upended Washington, seeing it as a deserved rebuke of elite sensibilities. President Donald J. Trump campaigned as a rough-speaking warrior against the political establishment, and his supporters have applauded him for governing the same way.

Beyond government, the country’s collective institutions — including the news media, the clergy and even professional sports and the entertainment industry — are in turmoil. Rather than calls for comity from political leaders, a feeling of apprehension has pervaded the highest levels of American politics.

Joseph R. Biden Jr., the former vice president, warned that something greater than even the legitimacy of the judicial branch was at stake,