It’s no secret that U.S. politics has become highly polarized.
Even so, there are probably few living Americans who ever witnessed anything that quite compares with this fall’s first presidential debate.
Was it really the case that the nation could do no better than a verbal food fight, with two candidates hurling fourth-grade insults and talking past each other?
To us, the discordant debate was just one more symptom of the nation’s fraying civic discourse, which, in a recent study, we were able to show extends to the words we use to talk about politics.
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