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How Today's Politics Tear Us Apart

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Americans need to get out more. We're not only divided into different political parties, polls show; we are becoming different Americas.

That's good for vigorous arguments, but it works against our ability to reach much agreement.

For example, the largest survey that the Pew Research Center has ever conducted on political attitudes reminds us of why 19th-century writer Henry Adams described politics as "the systematic organization of hatreds."

Substitute "passions" for hatreds and I think Adams quote was right on target, although in some people it is hard to tell the difference.

Pew found Republicans and Democrats to be more divided along ideological lines than at any point in the last two decades. Partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive, too.

The divisions are greatest, the survey of 10,013 adults nationwide found, among those who are the most engaged and active in the political process.

 

The number of people with consistently liberal or consistently conservative views on policy has increased, the poll found. Democrats tend to be more deeply liberal and Republicans more deeply conservative, with a lot less overlap than we saw even in Washington's polarized 1990s.

And confirming what many of us already have noticed, the study found partisan patterns in housing preferences. Seventy-seven percent of "consistently liberal" adults preferred the "walkability" of dense neighborhoods and compact homes, while 75 perent of "consistently conservative" adults wanted more land and suburban McMansions.

Pew refrained from offering possible explanations for this increasing polarization, but I offer my own short list:

1. Homophily. That's a term that sociologists coined in the 1950s for what most of us know as, "Birds of a feather flock together." Homophily -- love of the same -- describes our basic human attraction to others who are enough like us to confirm rather than test our core beliefs and prejudices.

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(c) 2014 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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