This is such a crucial point: The Right is eagerly using “polarization” laments as a strategy to shift blame and attention away from the extremism they exhibit, support, and enable. If “division” is the actual problem, isn’t that at least as much the “Left’s” fault?
Some more thoughts on this: 1/
It's important for you to know that a chunk of conservative dark money has recently been lobbed at academic research on "polarization," and it bears reflecting on why a framing of the US's contemporary crisis that automatically suggests there's blame on all sides would be favored by them
What we should be rejecting is a narrative that doesn’t simply diagnose polarization in distinct areas and dimensions, but dogmatically demands we put it at the center of our interpretation of the present and accept it as the key challenge the country is facing today.
I wrote about this here: 2/
Normatively, the “polarization” paradigm privileges unity, stability, and cohesion over social justice and equal participation; empirically, it gets the diagnosis of the current situation wrong; historically, it indulges an ahistorical nostalgia for a golden age that never existed. 3/
Once “polarization” is adopted as an overarching diagnosis, as a governing historical and political paradigm, it obscures what the key challenge to achieving a pluralistic democracy is – the anti-democratic radicalization of the Right. 4/
By latching onto “polarization” as the new consensus discourse, conservatives are counting on its obscuring-rather-than-illuminating features to present their actions and positions as legitimate and in line with the mainstream. 5/
After Republicans had blocked voting rights legislation in the Senate in early 2022, for instance, Senator Rob Portman explained how the actual problem was that “Democrats forced the Senate to vote on controversial … legislation,” which “will only increase the division and polarization.” 6/
After the assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul, Republicans were eager to shift the narrative away from “threat of far-right violence” to “both-sides extremism” – much better to join the mainstream of published elite opinion in bemoaning the problem than to be identified as the problem’s cause. 7/
Lamenting “polarization” was also the preferred strategy in conservative circles to attack Joe Biden’s “soul of the nation” speech in Philadelphia on September 1, 2022. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, for instance, declared that Biden “has become his foe’s polarizing image.” 8/
Bret Stephens made a very similar accusation in his NYT column. Instead of engaging with the actual diagnosis, conservatives warned of “polarization”: Forget the question of whether or not an urgent plea from the President was actually warranted and overdue – we demand unity! 9/
Invoking “polarization” as a big problem is guaranteed to garner support and approval from across the political spectrum. But as a master narrative of what is wrong with America, the “polarization” paradigm is not just analytically inept – it is actively misleading. 10/
There are many problems with the “polarization” narrative: It feeds and propagates an ahistorical nostalgia that helps provide fertile ground for a politics of reaction, it sanitizes and legitimizes elite anxieties over a changing society. 11/
it *Is* the central political issue of our time. But it is happening asymmetrically and happening more rapidly on the right. And the reason it’s happening at all is because the left decided it wasn’t acceptable to leave marginalized people out of the social compact, and the right said “fuck no”
Let us not forget Manchin's role in blocking voting rights bills. He always characterizes all his betrayals as a search for a way to overcome "polarization."
Manchin is a fascinating study in sociopathic prevarication. He gets furious whenever anyone points out his own self-dealing & actions in the interests of his children's businesses. He then will not support anything those who do this support. His shtick is always his reasonableness.
So - Democrats are to blame for any unpleasantness in Congress because they keep asking Republicans to do things that actually help average people while the Republicans only want to do stuff that helps wealthy white people or takes rights away from anyone who isn’t them?
