Britain is Less Polarised than the U.S. — Here’s Why
Party-identity politics make for social division
When America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, goes the saying. And perhaps nowhere is this more suspected than in Old Blighty.
Every Brit knows of the American culture wars. We’ve all seen the documentaries and the news footage — splenetic ideological foes waving banners screaming hey-hey-ho-ho insert policy has got to go/ho ho, hey hey, insert policy is here to stay. Working next door to the Supreme Court, I saw these dynamics up close. And, like any Brit living in America, I reasoned that at least my home country was less divided.
In recent times however, many politics watchers have wondered if that will always be the case. A haunting fear that perhaps the “Brexshitter” vs “Remoaner” mudslinging we see online is the thin end of the wedge — that if politics is downstream from culture, “real world” culture is downstream from social media, and the more time we spend online the more difficult to draw the distinctions between them anyway. Since Brexit…
