Polarization In American Politics

Are we experiencing a culture war? The term is unfortunate, as it is unnecessarily hyperbolic. There is no war. Yet there has been a restructuring in American religion that, in turn, is reflected in contemporary voting patterns. However, this is a case where “there is not a new thing under the sun.” Religion plays a role in the politics of the present, just as it has in the past, and as it almost certainly will in the future.

The falsely perceived divisions occurring among the population amid what has been called a “culture war” in the United States is nothing but a fabricated invention of the media and the political system that feast on conflict. Whether we are in the midst of a culture war depends entirely on what one means by the term. Most often, the term is simply used to describe the fact that American politics is polarized. However, when we strip away the hyperbole, the term actually means a tremendously significant development in American religion, society, and politics. This is a case where the term itself has served as a distraction from the important

While Fiorina's evidence is convincing that Americans are not polarized in one sense, this does not rule out polarization in quite another. In physics, polarization refers to elementary particles spinning in alignment." In politics, we might think of individual voters as the most elementary particle and so another definition of political polarization is that, within parties, individuals "spin" in the same direction. In the succinct phrasing of the Oxford English Dictionary, to polarize means "to give unity of direction to.” By this definition, Americans have clearly undergone a dramatic polarization over the last generation. Within both Republican and Democratic ranks, there is unequivocally increasing unity and