To understand the death of American political comity, look at the bridge between Reagan and Gingrich. Reagan established the right-wing drive to centralize control, but Gingrich, with the help of the new Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh, took that ideological framework and turned it into an all-out cultural assault on America. He didn’t just break congressional precedent—he broke the nation’s capacity for shared truth. By replacing collegiality with systemic hostility, he ensured that polarization …