Thanks to the Internet politics are less local than ever. There’s more unity on the national level and members of each party are really expected to toe the line on almost every issue.
Yeah but they were saying a lot of malicious and and inflammatory stuff long before the Lewinsky stuff. Just the fact that they would try to hang him with that shows a dramatic change in tone and tactics than in a few decades past. If think it’s largely due to a few things:
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As others mentioned, people have more sources for their information. In addition to what others have said, I also think this also has the effect of publicizing and magnifying minor disagreements, in addition to making politicians take public positions on things they would otherwise be quite about. The horse trading that was and still is fairly common is now more difficult because every move is gonna be scrutinized.
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People are now clustered geographically based on their political views. The book, The Big Sort, discusses a lot of this. If you are less likely to encounter people who are different from you, you tend to avoid self examination.
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Money in politics also means politicians have to be back in their districts more often, or in fund raisers. This has the effect of them only hearing from certain constituencies and has the added negative of them not fraternizing with their colleagues.
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Advances in sociology, psychology and other fields, in addition to better data collection, have made it easier to predict voter behavior and focus efforts to the exclusion of people who won’t vote for you.
A lot of it has to do with redistricting. Some of it has to do with information. I think Nixon kind of paved the way for hyper-partisan politics, even though he himself was actually a pretty liberal republican. Reagan kind of sealed the deal, even though again, he was fairly liberal compared to conservatives today. Clinton did nobody any favors with his sex scandal, and then the whole Florida 2000 fiasco really was the final nail in the coffin. People chose their sides and dug in, and I think for a very long time, we’re going to have hyper partisan politics in America.
I’m the last person to defend Fox News or national-level Republicans, but you guys are aware of the irony of posting in this thread to say “It’s the Republicans’ fault,” right?
None of these internet and media change hypotheses can explain the impeachment of Clinton very well, or Gingrich shutting down the government.
But I would go back to the heavy reliance on “values” based partisan attacks. The card carrying member of the ACLU stuff, the Moral Majority, Heck, how about Ratfucking and the Southern Strategy?
And of course one side can be primarily responsible for discord and conflict between two parties.
I think you’re looking at too short a time period. America is more polarized than it was in the 1950s, but that’s because the 1950s was a period of unusual consensus. There’s a lot of polarization in American politics now, but you’re not seeing congressmen beat senators on the floor of the Senate, which you saw in 1856. The Iraq war was controversial, but there wasn’t an organized regional meeting to discuss secession in protest, like there was in 1815. There’s been some domestic terrorism, but you’re not seeing anything like the anarchist bombings of the 1920s or the Klan of the 1870s. There’s no organized third party reform movement like the Populists at the end of the 19th century.
It’s very, very simple–things go in cycles. I suggest that you content yourself with the fact that at least we don’t have physical fights on the floor of Congress this time around.
http://www.civilwar.org/hallowed-ground-magazine/unpopular-mr-lincoln.html
Or for that matter, the Civil War. It may sound harsh and cynical, but slavery was a political issue.
Hell, what about Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton dueling?
Polarization and hostility can go together but they’re not the same exact thing. There have been periods in American history where there was more hostility but in some of them there were more than two parties, and things were more factional.
Because you believe it is. Care to give further examination to the era of McCarthyism, followed by the civil rights era? The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was filibustered, for pete’s sake.
You think it is because the 24/7 news cycle tells you so. You wouldn’t think so if you got it from the nightly network news and the daily paper. Additionally, all of it feeds back into the politicians and makes them even more intransigent. Now they can’t go back on what they said and compromise because it’ll get out about 30 seconds after they do it, which damages their credibility with their constituents.
As you may imagine, it was only with some reluctance that I opened a search on the term “Ratfucking.” Huh! I remember paying fairly close attention to the Watergate scandal, from beginning to end, and yet that term somehow had escaped me. You wouldn’t hear John Chancellor or Walter Cronkite using it, and Chancellor was my main news guy. Ah, the internet! The things you learn!
I agree it’s easy to overstate things, but I also think you are trying to impose an unreasonable standard without context. Things like fights in the Senate happened because society as a whole was more vicious and bellicose at the time. Life meant a lot less back then. But even if you want to answer the question over such a long time scale, you should look at the polarization of politics relative to the societal norms and trends. The world is safer than ever, people cooperate on social and business ventures more often than ever, people and and enterprises are more interconnected than ever, and people are more reasonable and tolerant than ever, yet our politicians are less likely to connect and cooperate than in many other times in the recent past.
It’s the divergent trends that are troubling. The world gets better, and politics gets worse. It’s not any solace that McCain hasn’t assaulted someone on the Senate floor. The issue is that while the world is becoming better and better equipped to solve problems and mediate disputes, our political system is becoming less capable of doing so.
The second part of this is right; the first part - although I don’t want to discount historical perspective entirely - is not. If there were no cable news and no social media, we could still read about bill after bill dying because the House and Senate can’t get together, the continuing debt ceiling and sequestration nonsense and (stay tuned!) another possible government shutdown. If you read this once a day or saw it once a night, it’d still be awful.
I think Marley has it. Political forces can amass a national presence easily. There’s no reason for either side to back down and compromise now.
The Republicans had total control for a number of years in the mid-2000s and wrecked the country. So they can’t appeal to people based on what they stand for. They can’t say “remember how great it was when everyone voted Republican?”
So what can they do? They can try to get people to hate/fear the democrats even more. Focus all the energy into driving hatred to.
I don’t know what the cause/effect relationship is in regards to that, the internet, and fox news. The internet and fox news allow a whole lot of people to completely surround themselves in an echo chamber where they’re happily scared and told what to hate over and over again. Everyone they know thinks their very country is being destroyed by a communist takeover, they hear it from every news story and every internet message board post they read, and they all get themselves worked up into a frothing ball of retard.
What makes people think that politics are “so much more polarized than [they] used to be”?
Do people think that politics weren’t polarized in the 1960s or at other periods.
Hell, I don’t even see much evidence that they’re more polarized than they were in the 1990s.
My guesses would be
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The birth of media echo chambers on both sides where people could hear the opinions they wanted to hear (as well as opinions more ideologically pure than they would normally agree with), pushing people further to the edges.
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The collapse of the soviet union left us without an enemy. If the division started around Clinton’s time, that would make sense. But at the same time, this 12 year war on terror has not decreased polarization. So maybe not.
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The influence of money in politics has raised the stakes. Now that it takes tens of millions to win a senate race, people have more to lose by treating partisanship as a minor annoyance.
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The rise of resentment and emotional politics (although this probably existed before). Issues with high emotional response (race, abortion, culture) are used instead of bland, unemotional discussions about policy anymore.
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Due to things like gerrymandering, there are more and more safe districts in the house. Now the only competition is in the primary among who is the most ideologically pure. Add in the fact that there is a geographic purification (the south has gotten rid of democrats, the west coast and northeast has gotten rid of republicans) and now there aren’t many people who can cross party lines.
Heh. 
It today’s climate what is more contentious than the Vietnam War? Is there anything that brings out passion (of the wrong kind) like the 1972 busing in Boston that led to this picture? I think Airman is closest to getting it right: we think it’s bad because the media tells us it’s bad. It’s similar to public opinion on crime; we always think it’s bad even if it’s historically good.
So, what are the prospects for the trend ever reversing? We can’t just keep on getting more and more polarized until we have a civil war. Not that I think anyone is seriously interested in one. At this point.
Not a Civil War, as such, but we might see a new wave of domestic terrorism. I don’t think that will happen, though; it’s kind of a worst case.
Much more likely is that we keep staggering from one controversy to the next. Benghazi, Zimmerman, Snowden, etc. Whatever scandal happens to occur closest to an election will have an absurdly outsized effect on it.
Drunks, fools, and the U.S.A.