although lefties tend to favor the activity and cultural goodies in big cities where righties favor the exurbs, if they can afford them. The ring of burbs around the cities between downtown and the exurbs is still mixed political turf, although it's leaning more to the conservative side as people with nothing to do once the kids are in bed start watching crime shows and get paranoid.

I'm your typical lefty, always living in the inner city, watching PBS and eating at hole in the wall indie restaurants instead of at chains.

That is why it is so easy to gerrymander -- for either party. That is why we have reliably red and blue states. That is why the national political campaigns concentrate their resources in a smaller number of states every four years.

has been gerrymandered to include a lot of little wingnut churches. I think others might be organized the same way. Still, the most reliable red areas are the exurbs and rural areas.

I belong to three community and conservation oriented groups and the split is now obvious. The people who were friends in the past have separated based on Republican vs Democratic. The conservation groups which had members from both parties 10 years ago have dwindled and only the Democratic people are involved now. Conservation does not seem to fit the Fox "news' / Glenn Beck narrative.

There is no hint of violence yet among these people around me, but from what I see in the Las Vegas shooting and the one in Georgia, the divide is turning into violence by the right-wing teabaggers. The open-carry nuts in Texas and their demonstrations are not a good sign and the pro-gun vs gun control arguments IMO will be turning more dangerous based on those events.

If there will be violence between the two factions, there are certainly enough guns in the US to kill a lot of people. While certainly many Democrats have guns, I sense that most are held by the right-wing.

There were extremely conservative southern Democrats who still had issues in common with liberal Dems. And there were liberal Republicans who could cross party lines to get things done in Congress with liberal Dems. Guys like Dirksen and Eisenhower would probably be run out of the Republican Party today for not being ideologically pure enough. I'm not sure why this is, but gerrymandering and the influence of overwhelming money after Citizens United may have contributed to it. The media also has stopped covering issues from all sides and just seems to want to present a drama of two sides confronting each other and bashing each other because that gets the people's blood up and sells products. TV news departments now have to be profitable whereas they were often insulated from corporate sponsorship influence in the old days when there were only three networks.

when you're working for the devil'....and the overwhelming success of the rightwing pig media proves that all the money is gone to hell, for good!. The immense sums spent facilitating the vast frauds our corrupt/evil/stooopid/ society needs for its howling success has convinced the majority of US folk that we are the 'good guys' versus the other guys- look at tv if ya want proof! Anyway, when truth forces itself upon us, no one can pretend they are surprised- there were no wmd's in Iraq, and 911 was choreographed, and OJ Simpson put a generation of nazipooh kids through college etc, and 12 guys really did walk on the moon....
humanity puts 100 million tonnes of carbon into earth's 12 mile thick atmosphere every 24 hours, and will continue every day to add 100 millions tonnes to the principal, until one day the fraud will be too big even for the hard guys who run the world, and they will stop it, but....it'll be too late, and....and....

The internet has many virtues, but it has made it easier to engage in political discussion only with people one already agrees with, and hence never to have one's preconceptions challenged.

An awful lot of DUers say they simply aren't interested in talking to conservatives. Before the internet, that was a harder desire to fulfill if you wanted to talk politics at all.

prior to widespread communication between people with similar views in various locations, political groups in situ were more isolated. that goes for the left and the right. I am typical of this OP and can't really talk about what the right is doing because I avoid interaction with that mindset. Just not interested in hearing what they have to say based upon the track record of those they support.

Communication happened more slowly, before the last 15 years or so, through magazines that ranged from very liberal to moderate to conservative, and daily newspapers. People around the nation read The New York Times to get a wider view of the world - or one of the other major city dailies, but the NYT was the standard.

The NYT tarnished itself during the Iraq War moment by publishing Judith (the Aspens bloom) Miller uncritically. I read what was obvious propaganda in the NYT during the Iraq War. I did read editorials that I agreed with. But I knew about the propaganda because I read the newspapers from other nations, online. I started relying on The Guardian for news about the Iraq War.

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/

I and others signed on the DU or Daily Kos and started tracking issues and informing our online communities. I saw pictures and Republican Party job attached to the "bourgeois riot" in the Florida theft of a national election. I saw Chalabi's stage managed return to Iraq, with his supporters who were aligned with the neo-cons, who thought they could continue 1950s Kermit Roosevelt-style CIA tactics and depose/murder an elected leader and install a puppet (that was Mosaddegh and the Shah - and that turned out really well, didn't it, empire builders?

I saw Rumsfeld shaking hands with Hussein in the past when, working in private industry, he sold the weapons that he then claimed were in existence... but of course, those chemicals were degraded.

I saw the revolving door between war profiteering and war-making by industry and govt. I read Smedley Butler, who laid it all out nearly a century ago.

And that doesn't even begin to go into culture issues, such as the war on women, waged with the most idiotic statements from the religious right since... I was going to say since Pat Robertson opened his mouth, but he's still saying some pretty fucked up stuff and getting paid to do so.

GBLT - internet access allows people to show their support for this issue, even when they're just friends, not the target of the religious right.

The Economy. This is where the powers-that-be better wake up. Both parties need to recognize the oily-garchs and banksters have overplayed their hands. A real populist third party is possible in the near future. If Democrats want to keep voters, they need to address this. Otherwise Caribou Barbie and her ilk will lead the way.

and pointed this out, and we were told we were nuts. I guess now that Pew has said it, it's ok.

It is maddening actually.

was involved in a research project that looked at internet use from liberals and conservatives. That research indicated, from web searches, that liberals seek out more varied sources for their news... and, not surprisingly, liberals are often more accurate about a variety of issues.

so, it's not just polarization - it's that the right wing is being fed lies and they don't know it.

but posters here called us all kinds of names. So at this point, I like to point this out, we were not wrong, just ahead.

... paint a picture of a alternative reality that doesn't exist. Millions of people are now genuinely convinced that we'd be better off without the EPA, FDA, and Social Security. They think supply-side economics works. Fortunately they're not yet finding out the hard way that their alternative reality would be a disaster.

I like to use this conservative political cartoon from 1860 (engraved by Currier & Ives!).

Recall that in 1860 the Republicans were a liberal/left party, and there's not one bit of it that's unfamiliar.

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003674590/

"The Republican Party Going to the Right House"

Lincoln rides in on a rail (fence rail, that is), carried by Horace Greely (anti-slavery editor of the New York Tribune), leading his followers into a lunatic asylum.
GREELY: "Hold on to me Abe, and we'll go in here by the unanimous consent of the people."
LINCOLN: "Now my friends I'm almost in, and the millennium is going to begin, so ask what you will and it shall be granted."

Younger Woman: "Oh! what a beautiful man he is, I feel a passionate attraction' every time I see his lovely face."
Bearded Man: "I represent the free love element, and expect to have free license to carry out its principles."
Man with trim beard and hat: "I want religion abolished and the book of Mormon made the standard of morality."
Caricatured black man: "De white man hab no rights dat cullud pussons am bound to spect' I want dat understood."
Older woman: "I want womans rights enforced, and man reduced in subjection to her authority."
Scruffy man with bottle: "I want everybody to have a share of everybody elses property."
Barefoot man: "I want a hotel established by government, where people that aint inclined to work, can board free of expense, and be found in rum and tobacco."
Seedy top-hat man: " I want guaranteed to every Citizen the right to examine every other citizen's pockets without interruption by Policemen."
Man at the end: "I want all the stations houses burned up, and the M.P.s killed, so that the bohoys can run with the machine and have a muss when they please."

CNN started 24/7 cable news broadcasting in 1980. Rupert Murdoch started buying up U.S. media in 1985. Reagan & Co. (Lee Atwater, et al) conveniently got rid of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Kenneth Starr began his serial "scandal" political witch hunts in 1994. Fox News started up in 1996. Starr's witch hunts eventually led to the attempted coup known as the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998.

The die was cast. I blame a lot of the polarization on the rise of 24/7 propagandistic media after Reagan & Co. eliminated the Fairness Doctrine and its requirement for some degree of balance/equal time in news and opinion reporting.

about the farthest apart that they've ever been overall, the GOP has moved much farther away from the political center (and at a faster rate) than the Democrats have. Democrats have remained fairly consistent over the years in terms of economic policy, while moving leftward on social policies. Simultaneously, the GOP has moved far, far to the right on both ever since Reagan. It all started unraveling during the Civil Rights era and during Nixon, but the Reagan era was when things really started getting cranked up. He is the guy responsible for unleashing trickle-down upon us and capitalizing on race-based resentment from conservatives. And today, his party no longer supports things that they once did, whether it's infrastructure, voting rights for everyone, or health care.
Democrats (and Obama especially) have been more than willing to govern, but Republicans refuse to (unless it's about invading people's sex lives).