Not just any friendship: Bob Inglis led the founding of a new PCA church in Greenville, called Redeemer Presbyterian. Jim DeMint’s son played mandolin there, and soon the senior DeMints joined.

In the heat of the 2010 election, Sen. Jim DeMint got a call for help from his old friend Rep. Bob Inglis, a fellow South Carolina Republican locked in a tough primary battle.
The two men had played together, prayed together and politicked together for nearly two decades. Mr. Inglis hoped an endorsement from Mr. DeMint, a tea-party icon and rising GOP star, might appease constituents who thought he’d been too conciliatory to Democrats, despite his broadly conservative record.

Mr. DeMint turned him down. “He’s still a friend,” Mr. DeMint says of Mr. Inglis. “I’ve got lots of friends.” The two are now barely on speaking terms, say several people who know both.

The unraveling of the DeMint-Inglis friendship is emblematic of the balkanized state of American politics after last week’s historic midterm election. The two men fell out over disagreements that to outsiders might appear less significant than the many things on which they agree. That phenomenon now marks the political landscape: Both parties, largely shorn of centrists, are feuding within their ranks in addition to fighting the other side.

On the left, unions spent millions to unseat Arkansas Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln in the primary over her stance on labor issues. She was later voted out of office. Since the party’s drubbing last week, its most liberal members have been chastising the White House for not taking more left-wing positions.

On the new political landscape, Republican and Democratic parties are battling within their own ranks in addition to fighting the other side.

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