by jpitney | Apr 27, 2023 | Civility, Polarization, Public Opinion, Social Media
From the American Bar Association: A massive 85% of U.S. residents believe civility is worse compared to 10 years ago, and a majority believe social media and media are to blame, according to the fifth annual American Bar Association Survey of Civic Literacy. Nearly a...
by jpitney | Mar 6, 2023 | Polarization, Public Opinion
David French at NYT: And where are we now? Has the fever passed? Not by a long shot. America is in the grips of a simply staggering amount of partisan animosity. As I wrote in my newsletter last week, overwhelming majorities of Republicans and Democrats believe that...
by jpitney | Feb 11, 2023 | Civility, Deliberation, Polarization
Robert Alexander at RealClearPolitics: In order to move beyond this “polarization pandemic,” we must start with civility. Our politicians must set a better example for all of us. Tolerance is a key feature of healthy democracies and is most likely to prevail when...
by jpitney | Nov 3, 2022 | Bipartisanship, Congress, House of Representatives, Polarization
For years, writes Don Wolfensberger at The Hill, a conservative coalition forged compromise in the House. But that model was understandably challenged by a large cohort of new, liberal Democrats elected in 1974 (“the Watergate Babies”) who had been schooled in the...
by jpitney | Oct 18, 2022 | Polarization
Charles Homans and Alyce McFadden at NYT: As a new poll suggests, the increasingly stark ideological divides of American politics have come with personal consequences. Nearly one in five voters — 19 percent — said that politics had hurt their friendships or family...
by jpitney | Aug 26, 2022 | Higher Education, Polarization
Samuel Abrams at AEI: Far too often, the headlines are missing the fact that so much closed-mindedness and balkanization in terms of openness toward engaging with political difference is far more pronounced on the left. And this is a phenomenon that I have observed as...
