Your political rivals aren’t as bad as you think – here’s how misunderstandings amplify hostility

  U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene drew raised eyebrows when she suggested on Presidents Day that the United States pursue a “national divorce.”

  Even in an era of seemingly ever-growing political polarization – and despite Taylor Greene’s record of making controversial statements – the proposal shocked members of both political parties.

  The last thing I ever want to see in America is a civil war. Everyone I know would never want that – but it’s going that direction, and we have to do something about it,” Taylor Greene said in a follow-up interview.

The two-party system is here to stay

  The American two-party system has long been besieged. Many of the founders feared that organizing people along ideological lines would be dangerous to the fledgling nation. Alexander Hamilton called political parties a “most fatal disease,” James Madison renounced the “violence of faction,” and George Washington feared that an overly successful party would create “frightful despotism.”

Don’t be fooled – most independents are partisans too

  Will Donald Trump win reelection in 2020? To find out, you’d think you could just look up whether more Americans are registered as Republicans than Democrats.

  But the truth is, it doesn’t really matter which party you register with on paper. Besides, 19 states don’t even register voters by party.

Partisan divide creates different Americas, separate lives

  When people try to explain why the United States is so politically polarized now, they frequently refer to the concept of “echo chambers.”

  That’s the idea that people on social media interact only with like-minded people, reinforcing each other’s beliefs. When people don’t encounter competing ideas, the argument goes, they become less willing to cooperate with political opponents.

Steven Horwitz: The Problem with political heroes and villains

  It’s sometimes hard to tell the coverage of politics from the coverage of sports. People seem to root for political parties as though they were sports teams, cheering Team Red or Team Blue on to victory with the same passion they bring to the Super Bowl. Individual team members are followed with the same intensity as are star players in basketball or football.

  Similarly, the guys on your team are always the heroes, and the guys on the other team are the villains. Political discourse in America today is filled with this sort of rhetoric, with one group saying the other group is a bunch of racist troglodytes who hate poor people, and the other group saying the first group is a bunch of crypto-Communists out to destroy America. Both sides yell and scream about how bad the people on the other team are, and there is little serious talk about the real issues facing Americans today.