At this point, Americans who are politically inclined seem to be polarized to an almost unprecedented degree. You would almost think that they come from entirely different worlds with practically no shared experiences, values, or sense of ‘oneness’. To attribute this solely to Trump, the Tea Party, Occupy, or any such group would be a shallow explanation. There is something much deeper here and the more important question is how we can possibly overcome it.
Around 40-50 years ago an American political party realized that the best way for them to achieve electoral success was by dividing Americans up by race and creating different disparate minority groups. They embraced hyphenated-Americanism and encouraged the formation of smaller racially focused interest groups and social functions. 40 years later and we have the modern Democratic Party, who thrives off of people who are deathly afraid of the white man and cling to identity politics.
There you have it!
It’s not really fair to accuse one single party of this issue. That is tantamount to accusing the Republican Party alone for causing the Civil War when there were faults on both sides. The Republicans, by pandering to those who engaged in white flight and the Dixiecrats through “law and order” politics, are also to blame for our current polarization. Democrats became the party of redistribution under FDR and, thanks to their incorporation of Civil Rights, this redistribution meant not merely from wealthy whites to poor whites, but from privileged people (almost exclusively white) to the disenfranchised, which Democrats (wrongly) concluded were almost exclusively non-white. In my opinion, this was partly a good thing as it incorporated minority groups into American politics and society, thereby giving them a fairer amount of power. The reason Bernie Sanders has greater appeal to white voters than Hillary is specifically for this reason: he pays greater attention to the traditional Democratic issue of class instead of race. Republicans have fed on this racial divide to inflame their overwhelmingly white base.
It can be debated who started it, but all that matters is that it exists and is the cornerstone of modern American politics, and is highly unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Racial issues will likely forever be a problem in American politics.
