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A major new interpretation of political polarization in America that traces its origins to fundamentally incompatible constitutional visions

American politics seem intractably polarized; no-holds-barred political conflict has engulfed not only electoral contests but disputes over courts, universities, expertise, and the administrative state. How did our politics become so gladiatorial? In Enemy Establishments, Calvin TerBeek argues that the conventional wisdom about polarization, centering on political parties, mistakes an outcome for a cause; in fact, parties were among the last major institutions to polarize. TerBeek traces the origins of polarization to the early twentieth century, when the Progressive project remade the Constitution, built the modern administrative state, and embedded new understandings of law, expertise, and governance across an interconnected array of institutions including courts, agencies, universities, and the professions-provoking a fierce conservative response.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials, TerBeek shows that conservatives targeted these newly reformulated institutions as their collective enemy-what they called the Establishment. They quickly conjured its mirror image, a set of parallel institutions that became a rival Establishment. These two Establishments formed the axes of polarization as competing elites waged protracted institutional warfare long before roll-call votes diverged and party coalitions solidified. TerBeek argues that liberals' certainty in their own institutional authority is as implicated in our polarized politics as conservatism's drive to displace it. Anchored in incompatible constitutional visions, each experienced the other's authority as illegitimate. The century-long struggle that still embroils Americans today is not over what the state should do but what the state fundamentally is.