Polarization is a Black Hole
What will it absorb next?
Everything’s polarized these days.
The country is bitterly divided, red vs. blue. Our two political parties are engaged in scorched-earth warfare for control of the government, and each is convinced that if the other wins, the consequences will be apocalyptic.
For many Americans, political alignment has surpassed ethnicity, religion, neighborhood, and other signifiers as a primary social identity. Fewer and fewer Americans are willing to marry someone of the other party, and an increasing number of us say that it would be very hard to date someone with differing political beliefs.
Not only have we sorted ourselves into political tribes, but we’ve made more and more issues into political litmus tests. It’s not just your views on taxation or foreign policy that signal your party affiliation — it’s all sorts of things. Let me describe several people, and I bet your brain will immediately sort them into one political camp or the other:
- A country music listener who drives a Ford F-150
- A person who drives a Prius with a pro-composting bumper sticker
- Someone who affixes their pronouns to their email signature
- A person who grumbled about mask and vaccine mandates during the height of…
