It's Been 150 Years Since the U.S. Was This Politically Polarized [View all]

[Katashi_itto]

A new survey from the Pew Research Center reveals that political polarization in the United States has reached a dangerous extreme. The gap between what Democrats and Republicans believe is enormous, with almost no center ground. We haven't seen such strong polarization since the Civil War.

Photo by Andrew Kuznetsov

At this point, you might be thinking, "bullshit." We're seeing more polarization than the 1960s, with Vietnam and the culture wars? The 1950s, with segregation and McCarthyism? The answer is yes, those were decades of profound ideological division within the United States. But they weren't the apex. Political polarization has grown more pronounced with each passing decade, until we've reached…well, now.

A quick visualization (below):
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--t1MOixRa--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/bkqafxp1i49lqqqez5dd.jpg
In 2012, political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal quantified the degree to which Democrats and Republicans have become ideologically homogenous and separated from one another. In the chart above, which portrays voting patterns in Congress, high numbers represent polarization—the House and Senate vote predictably along party lines, even on issues that are not typically sources of division—while low numbers represent voting that was less predictable and more mixed, indicating there were opportunities for compromise and bipartisan coalitions. The post-Civil War, Reconstruction era saw divisions gradually erode as we entered into the two World Wars and the Depression, and picked up again as we moved into the latter half of the century.

So, in one sense, the results of the new Pew survey were not entirely unexpected—but they still manage to surprise, in terms of the extent to which our ideologies have come to define us.

Enemy Mine
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