We're Not Polarized Enough

Many of our political forebears pined for more polarization. For much of the last century, America’s two parties were so ideologically diverse that social scientists, politicians, and pundits fretted about the incoherence of their identities and the murky stakes of any given election. There were liberal Republicans—figures like New York’s Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller—as supportive of civil rights and large government programs as some of their colleagues on the left wing of the Democratic Party. And there were famously dogged opponents of civil rights and big government in the Democratic Party—the likes of Strom Thurmond and James Eastland—who were much more right-wing than most Republicans. As late as 1976, not long after Richard Nixon, a Republican, proposed a universal health care program and created the Environmental Protection Agency, about one-third of Americans believed there were no ideological differences between the parties, and only a slim majority labeled the GOP the more conservative of the two.