Polarization in America is here to stay. What now?{IMAGES}

http://grist.org/politics/polarization-in-america-is-here-to-stay-what-now/

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By now, it’s obvious to everyone that U.S. political life has become extremely polarized. Not only are lawmakers further and further apart, but the American people are too, geographically and ideologically. Obama famously denied that there’s a red America and blue America, but it turns out he was wrong. There’s red America, a sparsely populated but vast landscape of rural and suburban areas, and there’s blue America, the “urban archipelago” upon which the left’s constituencies — single women, minorities, cosmopolitans — cluster:



Among the U.S. intelligentsia, polarization is generally seen as an aberration, a problem to be solved with more civility or centrist third parties or procedural reforms. Bemoaning polarization is the favorite indoor sport of Washington VSPs.

The fact is, however, that polarization is the norm in U.S. politics. The bipartisan era was the aberration:



That midcentury era of bipartisanship can be traced almost entirely to America’s system of racial apartheid. There were lots of socially liberal northern Republicans and racist Southern Democrats, which left the parties ideologically scrambled enough that coalitions could be stitched together across party lines. Thus all the momentous legislative achievements of those years, from the Civil Rights Act to the Clean Air Act.