Can the polarization between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. be reversed?

[The Valkyrie]

Yes.

But it will involve a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence.

[Minimalist]

The past included a civil war.  The reconciliation resulted from the the understanding that the preferred path for one side is blocked by overwhelming military force proven able and willing to win.

Right.  "Government of the people, for the people and by the people," was imposed on 35% of those people at bayonet point.

And let's not forget that once "reconstruction" was done as far as the north was concerned the south was every bit as bad as it was before to the emanicpated slaves.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/us/ly...abama.html

A Lynching Memorial Is Opening. The Country Has Never Seen Anything Like It.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opening Thursday in Montgomery, Ala., is dedicated to victims of white supremacy.

So I see it as less of a "reconciliation" and more of an acquiescence to white southern mentalities.



(Just a reminder.)

[GUBU]

The answer is easy, take religion out of politics. The sooner the republican party gets rid of the far religious right the sooner we depolarize.

This message brought to you by a republican rural educated baby boomer.

They need to get rid of the racists too. I know there's plenty of overlap, but it's the racism problem that's the worst.

And on the thread title, should we bother trying? Any time we see "there's too much antagonism between Party L and Party R", it's always the more left leaning party which does all the compromising, even in cases (like with Labour in 1997*) where the right wing party is a clapped out Reliant Robin ready for the rubbish dump.

*Far too many people talk of the Tuberculosis Bacilli as if he was some sort of miracle worker, when he is not. Over the course of his three elections he lost over 5 million voters for Labour, in fact even his second election would have been a very close run thing only for the Tories were in the depths of the William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith, Michael Howard bottoming out period. It is largely his fault the Kippers got a foothold, and also that the pig fucker got an absolute majority in 2016 (after some timorous steps to the left Miliband chickened out and ran straight Blairite through the election, despite his rare lurches to the left being the times when he was riding highest in the polls).

[Angrboda]

Consider this extraordinary finding: In 1960, political scientists asked Americans how they would feel if their child married someone who identified with another political party. Four percent of Democrats and five percent of Republicans reported they would be “displeased.” In 2010, by contrast, 33 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of Republicans reported feeling “somewhat or very unhappy” at the prospect of interparty marriage. Being a Democrat or a Republican has become not just a partisan affiliation but an identity. A 2016 survey conducted by the Pew Foundation found that 49 percent of Republicans and 55 percent of Democrats say the other party makes them “afraid.” Among politically engaged Americans, the numbers are even higher—70 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of Republicans say they live in fear of the other party.

These surveys point to the rise of a dangerous phenomenon in American politics: intense partisan animosity. The roots of this phenomenon lie in a long-term partisan realignment that began to take form in the 1960s. For most of the twentieth century, American parties were ideological “big tents,” each encompassing diverse constituencies and a wide range of political views. The Democrats represented the New Deal coalition of liberals, organized labor, second- and third-generation Catholic immigrants, and African Americans, but they also represented conservative whites in the South. For its part, the GOP ranged from liberals in the Northeast to conservatives in the Midwest and West. Evangelical Christians belonged to both parties, with slightly more of them supporting the Democrats—so neither party could be charged with being “Godless.”

Because the two parties were so internally heterogeneous, polarization between them was far lower than it is today. Congressional Republicans and Democrats divided on such issues as taxes and spending, government regulation, and unions, but the parties overlapped on the potentially explosive issue of race. Although both parties contained factions supporting civil rights, southern Democrats’ opposition and strategic control of Congress’s committee system kept the issue off the agenda. This internal heterogeneity defused conflict. Rather than viewing one another as enemies, Republicans and Democrats frequently found common ground. Whereas liberal Democrats and Republicans often voted in Congress together to push the cause of civil rights, southern Democrats and right-wing northern Republicans maintained a “conservative coalition” in Congress that thwarted it.

The civil rights movement, culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, put an end to this partisan arrangement. Not only did it democratize the South, at long last, by enfranchising blacks and ending single-party rule, but it accelerated a long-run party system realignment whose consequences are still unfolding today. It was the Civil Rights Act, which Democratic president Lyndon Johnson embraced and 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater opposed, that would define the Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party of racial status quo. In the decades that followed, southern white migration to the Republican Party quickened. The racial appeals of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and, later on, Ronald Reagan’s coded messages about race communicated to voters that the GOP was the home for white racial conservatives. By century’s end, what had long been a solidly Democratic region had become solidly Republican. At the same time, southern blacks—blacks—able to vote for the first time in nearly a century—flocked to the Democrats, as did many northern liberal Republicans who supported civil rights. As the South went Republican, the Northeast went reliably blue.

The post-1965 realignment also began a process of sorting out voters ideologically. For the first time in nearly a century, partisanship and ideology converged, with the GOP becoming primarily conservative and the Democrats becoming predominantly liberal. By the 2000s, the Democratic and Republican parties were no longer ideological “big tents.” With the disappearance of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, areas of overlap between the parties gradually disappeared. Now that most senators and representatives had more in common with their partisan allies than with members of the opposing party, they cooperated less frequently and voted consistently with their own party. As both voters and their elected representatives clustered into increasingly homogeneous “camps,” the ideological differences between the parties grew more marked.

But the sorting of the American electorate into liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans cannot alone explain the depth of partisan hostility that has emerged in America. Nor does it explain why this polarization has been so asymmetric, moving the Republican Party more sharply to the right than it has moved the Democrats to the left. Ideologically sorted parties don’t necessarily generate the “fear and loathing” that erodes norms of mutual toleration, leading politicians to begin to question the legitimacy of their rivals. Voters are ideologically sorted in Britain, Germany, and Sweden, but in none of these countries do we see the kind of partisan hatred we now see in America.

Realignment has gone well beyond liberal versus conservative. The social, ethnic, and cultural bases of partisanship have also changed dramatically, giving rise to parties that represent not just different policy approaches but different communities, cultures, and values. We have already mentioned one major driver of this: the civil rights movement. But America’s ethnic diversification was not limited to black enfranchisement. Beginning in the 1960s, the United States experienced a massive wave of immigration, first from Latin America and later from Asia, which has dramatically altered the country’s demographic map. In 1950, nonwhites constituted barely 10 percent of the U.S. population. By 2014, they constituted 38 percent, and the U.S. Census Bureau projects that a majority of the population will be nonwhite by 2044.

Together with black enfranchisement, immigration has transformed American political parties. These new voters have disproportionately supported the Democratic Party. The nonwhite share of the Democratic vote rose from 7 percent in the 1950s to 44 percent in 2012. Republican voters, by contrast, were still nearly 90 percent white into the 2000s. So as the Democrats have increasingly become a party of ethnic minorities, the Republican Party has remained almost entirely a party of whites.

The Republican Party has also become the party of evangelical Christians. Evangelicals entered politics en masse in the late 1970s, motivated, in large part, by the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. Beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1980, the GOP embraced the Christian Right and adopted increasingly pro-evangelical positions, including opposition to abortion, support for school prayer, and, later, opposition to gay marriage. White evangelicals—who had leaned Democratic in the 1960s—began to vote Republican. In 2016, 76 percent of white evangelicals identified as Republican. Democratic voters, in turn, grew increasingly secular. The percentage of white Democrats who attended church regularly fell from nearly 50 percent in the 1960s to below 30 percent in the 2000s.

This is an extraordinary change. As the political scientist Alan Abramowitz points out, in the 1950s, married white Christians were the overwhelming majority—nearly 80 percent—of American voters, divided more or less equally between the two parties. By the 2000s, married white Christians constituted barely 40 percent of the electorate, and they were now concentrated in the Republican Party. In other words, the two parties are now divided over race and religion—two deeply polarizing issues that tend to generate greater intolerance and hostility than traditional policy issues such as taxes and government spending.

How Democracies Die. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

[The Grand Nudger]

That is pretty interesting. 

 I draw the line at what the peen and vj (or..you know...heart, whatever) wants.  I detest rightwing politics, but if some rightwing shitball made my daughters happy (or some rightwing ditz had my sons on cloud nine) I'd be cool with that and happy for all parties.  I'd still maintain that neither they nor their defining policy positions should ever be allowed anywhere near governance...just like no one in their right mind should ever hand me the keys to a bulldozer.

[Minimalist]

Democratic governments run into trouble when they try to maintain an empire.

Athens was a prime example.

[Little lunch]

Yes, you need to add a third polarising lens, turn it to just the right angle and you should see a gradual easing off of the light reduction.