I've wondered lately if the burgeoning crisis of partisanship will lead to a legitimate third party. That you'll have the further populist left either take over the Democratic party (just as the further populist right took over the Republican party in 2016), and then the remainder -- centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans will coalesce as a new or rebranded party along the center.
Without demonizing centrists, populists, or purist leftists, there are real, practical divisions between the further-left and the centrist-left. The centrist-left (think, mainstream, "law and order" or big-labor democrats) would have seen eye-to-eye with the further-left 15 years ago, but now there is real division just as there was with the Republican party 10 years ago, when the Tea Party rejected neoconservatism, and eventually resettled on Trump's brand of xenophobic traditionalist populism, while the 1990s and 2000's neoconservatives have since moved towards argumentatively siding with centrist Democrats (the Jonah Goldbergs, Bill Kristols, and David Frums of the former Republican party). Meanwhile, while centrist Democrats have felt quizicly blind-sided by more puritanical left Democrats, the more puritanical left legitimately not describes centrist Democrats with terms that used to only be used for Republicans and Conservatives: Racists, classists, gross, misogynists, war-mongers, etc; you're seeing an intra-ideological rift and vitriol ("just die already you old bitch" is something that I read from liberals talking about Nancy Pelosi) that you hadn't seen before on the American left....... But something you did see within the American right starting in 2006. While mainstream, closer-to-the-center Republicans wanted to become more inclusive after 2012, successful Republicans doubled-down on economic populism, isolationism, xenophobia, and selective libertarianism, and created a new far right in Congress that didn't exist from 1980 - 2010, and ultimately won a shocking White House victory in 2016.
Some people from all political stripes have often made appeals to "I wish the US had a legitimate 3rd party..." and we always assumed/implied it would be something further left or economically populist. But lately, I think if that 3rd party comes to prominence in the next 30 years, it's going to be on the centrist remains of a Republican/Democrat coalition, as it seems like large portions of the Democratic and Republican parties are convinced (and with good reason) that they can only win elections by pushing out further from the middle.
