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Old 01-28-2022, 02:40 PM
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M&J M&J is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: So. Cal
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A buddy sent me an opinion piece from the NY Times about the polarization taking place in this country since covid emerged. A snip from the write-up:

Quote:
GUEST ESSAY
Jan. 26, 2022
By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
Why did the national emergency brought about by the Covid pandemic not only fail to unite the country
but instead provoke the exact opposite development, further polarization?
I posed this question to Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton. McCarty emailed me back:

With the benefit of hindsight, Covid seems to be the almost ideal polarizing crisis. It was conducive to
creating strong identities and mapping onto existing ones. That these identities corresponded to
compliance with public health measures literally increased “riskiness” of intergroup interaction. The
financial crisis was also polarizing for similar reasons — it was too easy for different groups to blame
each other for the problems.

McCarty went on:
Any depolarizing event would need to be one where the causes are transparently external in a way that
makes it hard for social groups to blame each other. It is increasingly hard to see what sort of event has
that feature these days.

Polarization has become a force that feeds on itself, gaining strength from the hostility it generates,
finding sustenance on both the left and the right. A series of recent analyses reveals the destructive
power of polarization across the American political system.


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