Opinion | We Can't Even Agree on What Is Tearing Us Apart

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

47% : If I know where a senator stands on abortion, I know where that Senator stands on health care, gun rights, immigration, etc.Political scientists, he continued,have long argued that a sign of the disconnect between the mass public and elites is that the mass public's attitudes are multidimensional (knowing where someone stands on abortion, doesn't necessarily tell me where they stand on health care), while elites' attitudes are unidimensional.
44% : That is, if I knew your position on abortion, I didn't necessarily know your position on health care.
44% :In other words, polarization has created its own vicious circle, weeding out moderates, fostering extremists and constraining government action even in times of crisis.
43% : For example, "If a person is opposed to the expansion of Social Security, he is probably a conservative and is probably opposed as well to any nationalization of private industries, federal aid to education, sharply progressive income taxation, and so forth."
37% : This is especially the case if some of the issues have a large moral component (abortion, civil rights), where the other side is viewed as not just misguided but immoral, even evil.
29% : As these divisions overlap with each other and an increasing number of diverse policy issues (including value-laden issues like abortion, immigration, guns, etc. that also expose cultural fault lines and are much less amenable to compromise and standard political horse trading), it's little surprise that politics becomes more combustible.

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