While our gridlocked government may be partially “representative” of our polarized culture, there are few who are happy about the situation. And it seems like the default assumption, and the position often repeated in the mainstream media, is that both sides are responsible, which leads to the conclusion that the appropriate remedy is for politicians to simply meet in the middle and compromise for the greater good.

Both parties are not, however, equally responsible. Political scientists attribute much of the current polarization to the Republican party’s shift to the right over the past twenty years, even while Democrats have remained in relatively the same center-left position they have occupied since the Clinton administration. Yet even though the Democratic party overall has not moved substantially to the left, many Democratic donors and activists have nevertheless responded to Republicans with their own version of a combative tit-for-tat strategy that has further institutionalized the polarization. Moreover, despite polls indicating that most Americans favor bipartisan cooperation, since Newt Gingrich’s term as Speaker of the House in the 1990s, many Republicans have pursued a strategy apparently designed to actually create and maintain polarization. For some, this strategy is justified by the conclusion that a polarized system works in favor of those who seek to reduce government effectiveness and maintain the status quo.

Arguing that conservatives have a covert interest in maintaining polarization, a recent white paper by political scientists Matthew Nisbet and Dietram Scheufele concludes that the responsibility to overcome the current climate of polarization rests primarily with liberals. “If liberals respond to the provocations of the Right with rigidity, vitriol, outrage, and a growing unwillingness to compromise, they only strengthen the hand of their opponents, contribute to the gridlock of our political institutions, provide Republicans with an easy justification for obstruction, and ultimately make the unthinkable—the dismantling of the postwar welfare state—thinkable. Conservatives, in this sense, are playing a long game, happy to starve the beast and delighted by dysfunction, even when they control the government. For this reason, as liberals unwittingly conspire to turn American politics into a zero-sum game, conservatives win even when they lose.”

The above excerpt comes from the whitepaper published by the Institute for Cultural Evolution (ICE) on political polarization in America. The paper outlines the think tank’s strategy for combating the problem.

Tags:integral theorypolitical polarizationpoliticsSteve McIntosh