[balance_factor]

> polarization

What polarization is there in Washington? Or outside the beltway? What are the two poles? How people feel about transexuals? I don't see any polarization. The two parties are close together on almost everything. As the real differences fade, unimportant differences must be heightened. Trump is of that type - he makes a big show, but on what big issue in which he can get anywhere is he substantially far from the Democratic (or Republican) party? As real differences fade, the showmanship of there being a difference must increase, thus, Trump.

Even healthcare has no polarization. Both parties are agreed on what it should be. Any party acting as if it will do single player or scrap Obamacare is just showboating. Any changes that get through will be minor ones. It was a 60 Senator consensus vote of the middle-of-the-road consensus view of what healthcare would be. McCain's thumbs down to any major overhaul.

In the past two centuries the US went from a civil war to the intitial struggle of how to deal with the Great Depression. There hasn't been much polarization since that. Even the big squabble in the 1960s was over a non-issue - over a small, peasant country in Indochina. The cold war began cooling off in the early 1950s, and stayed cool, aside from occassional flare-ups in certain areas. By the 1970s, US conservatives were trying to figure out how to heat the cold war up again against the background of SALT and the Helsinki accords.

The political establishment is less polarized than ever nowadays. It's not like post-war France, where Joliot-Curie, Picasso, Sartre etc. were members of the largest political party in France - the PCF.

[RickS]

Your measure of polarization is talking about distance on a political spectrum. This is perhaps the correct way, since it's literally polar.

The vernacular "polarization" here would be better thought of as a measure not of conceptual distance, but of the intensity with which that distance is perceived.

The left and right are both very centrist (with some wacky outlier issues), but they perceive the other side as being very wrong, which allows for polarization regardless of actual political distance.

[mindways]

> What polarization is there in Washington?

Lower frequency of compromise and bipartisan bills. I've seen it just from reading the papers and staying semi-aware of politics. My mother-in-law worked in DC for decades, and it was glaringly evident to her even when she retired a decade or so ago.

> The two parties are close together on almost everything.

Along certain axes, sure. They're both broadly corporatist, for instance.

But overall? Not even close, particularly since the rise of the Tea Party. I read through my House Rep's notes on the legislation each side advances / endorses / votes for, which makes their actual legislative priorities pretty clear. Not to mention knowing people whose health, environment, and/or job are impacted by those ideological differences.

Most of the time I see "there's no difference between the two parties" asserted, it seems like it's either being used as a justification for apathy, or as a rallying cry for a third party.

[maxerickson]

I would argue that the big US squabble in the 1960s was civil rights.

Still not resolved (for example a couple of states have just recently been found to be in violation of the Voting Rights Act).

[stevenwoo]

It's kind of like we never satisfactorily resolved the end of slavery, we had to amend the Constitution in the 1960's because of states scamming African Americans of their right to vote because the post Civil War amendments did not outright prevent weasels from making it hard to vote for people of the wrong skin tone. We might have been further along now if Woodrow Wilson hadn't helped resurrect the KKK and started bringing racial discrimination and segregation into the federal government, the latter development took close to 50 years to roll back.

[cmurf]

Arguably Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant were too kind to southern aristocrats. What they should have done, historic atrocities as a guide, is executed the entire aristocracy down to the children and divided up the land to the slaves. We'd certainly have been further along now had that happened.

But Grant threatened resignation if pardons were not granted to Lee and all who surrendered at Appomattox. These men were absolutely over the war, and as the papers of the day indicate, most people were too. There really was no meaningful demand for treason trials for the lead generals.

And the sadly, as the Civil War determined slavery was absolutely wrong, it began 100 years of institutionalized 2nd class citizenry based on skin color. The Civil War was not a successful egalitarian enterprise by any stretch of the imagination.

[michaelbuckbee]

There's a fairly great Reddit post that I won't attempt so summarize here, but it walks through the party votes on major issues and highlights what I would consider a broader degree of difference.

https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/6pc5qu/democrats...

Separately, something that really concerns me is gerrymandering - which has pushed for more extreme views on both sides as there are far fewer "mixed" districts.

[yequalsx]

If you watch/read/listen to pundits you'll see lots of polarization. Or go to Facebook and look at the comments on articles. Liberals are evil. Conservatives are dumb. You'll see all sorts of such comments.

Conservative media portrayed Obama as an extreme leftist when he was, in terms of policies, more in line with Eisenhower and Reagan. Look at the label of RINOs for Congressmen who vote the wrong way on a particular issue.

In the U.S. there is a lot of political polarization.

[javajosh]

>What polarization is there in Washington? Or outside the beltway? What are the two poles?

The polarization is between those who prefer authoritarian leadership, and those who don't. The poles are defined primarily by personality.

[closeparen]

Bullshit. There's polarization between whether the authoritarian crackdown should primarily police business/capital, or people with the wrong identities, or more concerningly, both.