# Political Realignment

> Political Realignment is mapped as the banner: it bundles identities, candidates, resources, policy, and discipline into durable competition.

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:political-change:parties-factions:political-realignment` |
| Family | Parties, Factions & Machines |
| Domain | Organizations |
| Kind | institution |
| Archetypal function | The Banner |
| Epistemic status | synthesis; supported |

## Concrete anchor

Political Realignment belongs to the **Parties, Factions & Machines** family. It is treated as a specific political object, role, institution, tactic, event, ideology, or mechanism before any symbolic transfer is made.

## What it does

Political Realignment bundles identities, candidates, resources, policy, and discipline into durable competition, changing who can act, what becomes visible, and which costs are distributed to others.

## Who gains and who loses power

The mechanism can increase the capacity of actors able to use Political Realignment, while shifting cost, delay, risk, exclusion, or dependence toward actors with less authority, information, organization, money, or safe access. The distribution is conditional, not an essence of the node.

## Archetypal function

**The Banner.** Political Realignment is mapped as the banner: it bundles identities, candidates, resources, policy, and discipline into durable competition.

## Gift

coordinates large coalitions across time and scale; through Political Realignment, that capacity becomes available for deliberate use.

## Wound / Shadow

turns representation into gatekeeping, patronage, and factional enclosure; Political Realignment can then reproduce the very arrangement it claims to change.

## Conditions

- scale and jurisdiction are explicit
- affected people and absent stakeholders are named
- time horizon and countermoves are considered

## Strategic meaning

Use Political Realignment to identify the operative target, resource, dependency, decision forum, and likely countermove. Ask what would make the mechanism stronger, weaker, more legitimate, or less necessary.

## Divinatory meaning

The Banner enters through Political Realignment. Read for the capacity seeking expression, the cost displaced from view, and the relationship that changes if the frame moves.

**Question:** What changes when Political Realignment becomes the unit of analysis rather than background?

## Game function

**leverage.** Reveal one hidden dependency connected to Political Realignment; another player names a countermove. Initiative 1.

## Relationships

- **constrains — Party Convention:** Party Convention constrains Political Realignment by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **legitimizes — Party System:** Political Realignment legitimizes Party System by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **enables — Reaction:** Political Realignment enables Reaction by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_
- **counteracts — Council Communism:** Council Communism counteracts Political Realignment by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_

## Countermaps and polarity prompts

- Read Political Realignment from the viewpoint of the actor who bears its cost.
- Reverse cause and symptom: what if Political Realignment is an effect of the system it appears to drive?
- Change the clock: what looks different over a day, an election cycle, a generation, and a century?
- Ask when the Gift becomes the Wound through scale, secrecy, intensity, latency, or unequal reciprocity.

## Epistemic and Sentinel note

Claim layers: synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory. Scope, jurisdiction, period, and source perspective may change the claim.
No node-specific Sentinel factors were recorded; ordinary source, audience, and context checks still apply.

## Visual direction

A text-free enamel expression of Political Realignment: one dominant mechanism, one counterforce, raised warm-metal linework, midnight field, restrained civic red, teal, ivory, and amber. No party logo, national flag, sacred symbol, or recognizable person.

## Research / provenance

- [Introduction to Political Science](https://openstax.org/details/books/introduction-political-science) — OpenStax, 2022. Comparative institutions, political behavior, and public policy foundations.
- [2024 Republican Party Platform](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform) — Republican National Committee, 2024. Party self-description and program; not an external assessment.
- [2024 Democratic Party Platform](https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/) — Democratic National Committee, 2024. Party self-description and program; not an external assessment.

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Engine Output version 1.0.0; generated 2026-08-24T00:00:00Z. Sentinel annotations are stored separately in `sentinel/handoffs.json`.
