Politics & Power Quote by Thomas E. Mann

The phrase "healthy degree" does a lot of quiet work here: Mann is signaling that party unity is not the villain. In a functioning democracy, cohesive parties can clarify choices, discipline cranks, and make governing legible. By pairing that with "deteriorated", he frames polarization as a kind of institutional rot, not a sudden moral collapse. The line is diagnostic, almost clinical, but the diagnosis carries a moral charge: something once productive has been weaponized.

The subtext is a rebuke to the romantic fantasy of bipartisan harmony. Mann isn’t nostalgic for smoke-filled-room consensus; he’s warning that the mechanisms that turn competition into governance have broken down. "Bitter partisan warfare" is deliberately martial language, implying scorched earth tactics, permanent campaigning, and politics as identity combat rather than bargaining. It also hints at asymmetry without naming it: "Democrats and Republicans" are presented as a shared system, but the move from "unity" to "warfare" invites the reader to ask who benefits, who escalates, and which incentives reward obstruction.

Context matters: Mann’s career sits inside the post-1960s realignment, the rise of ideologically sorted parties, and the modern media ecosystem that monetizes outrage. The quote reads like a late-20th/early-21st-century institutionalist alarm bell: when parties become too cohesive internally and too hostile externally, compromise stops being a tool and starts looking like betrayal. His intent is less to scold voters than to spotlight how structures-primaries, gerrymandering, donor networks, and partisan news-have turned ordinary party discipline into an engine of conflict.