I keep reading and seeing all these stories on America’s political polarization, the great divide between left and right. Ted Koppel did a couple such reports for “CBS News Sunday Morning,” Robert Samuelson wrote a column on it for The Washington Post, Andrew Soergel pondered the question in U.S. News and World Report.
We have explored the role of social media, the loss of the Fairness Doctrine and the city/country divide in creating this break. But no one — at least, no one I’ve seen — has explored what seems to me the most glaringly obvious factor. We are not, after all, divided because Americans pulled back from the center and retreated into extremism.
No, we are divided because one party did. And it wasn’t the Democrats.
This column is written by a Republican. I keep saying that I need things to matter. I need the unhinged behavior by Trump to matter. I need the silence and complicity of his party in Congress to matter.
This column, ultimately, doesn’t end up saying much more than what I’ve quoted above, but at least it’s a start.