Polarization and Discussion

Mike Allen at Axios: The acrid state of politics is seeping into Americans’ relationships and behavior, according to a poll out today from the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP), headed by David Axelrod.   Driving the...

Despairing About Democracy

 Andrew Romano at Yahoo: A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that most Democrats (55%) and Republicans (53%) now believe it is “likely” that America will “cease to be a democracy in the future” — a stunning expression of bipartisan despair about the direction of the...

Twitter and Incivility

 Melanie Mason at LAT: It’s not your imagination. Political discourse on Twitter really has grown meaner in recent years, according to a new study. The research, published Thursday in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, found that the level of...

Upton on Death Threats and Public Service

Meet the Press, April 17, 2022: CHUCK TODD: You got death threats for voting for infrastructure spending. REP. FRED UPTON: I did. CHUCK TODD: You played these voicemails. We played these voicemails. REP. FRED UPTON: That’s why I’m here today. CHUCK TODD:...

The Splinternet

Nathan Gardels at Noema: The splinternet has predictably evolved into wars among platforms armed with predisposed views of reality that resist external checks on perceptions.   As Claire Webb writes in Noema, epistemes or paradigms determine how information is...