Quotes About Polarization

El partidismo extremo puede ser literalmente adictivo.

If you find yourself in a Whole Foods store, there's an 89 percent chance that the county surrounding you voted for Barack Obama. If you want to find Republicans, go to a county that contains a Cracker Barrel restaurant (62 percent of these counties went for McCain).

Like rats that cannot stop pressing a button, partisans may be simply unable to stop believing weird things. The partisan brain has been reinforced so many times for performing mental contortions that free it from unwanted beliefs. Extreme partisanship may be literally addictive.

Liberals and conservatives actually move further apart when they read about research on whether the death penalty deters crime, or when they rate the quality of arguments made by candidates in a presidential debate, or when they evaluate arguments about affirmative action or gun control.39

it doesn't matter if people love you or hate you, as long as they feel strongly one way or the other. The worst place you can be is in the middle.

By many measures, the Dominican Republic is a land of extremes.

On the one hand, there is a booming industry surrounding yoga, self-help, and spiritual tourism, while on the other, traditional religions seem polarized between fanaticisms of all types and vapid, consumerist banalities of the "I'm spiritual, but not religious" sort. The continued, tired debates of science on one side and religion on the other serve to muddy the waters even more.

Sympathy for victims is always counter-balanced by an equal and opposite feeling of resentment towards them.

All that will be left are polarized groups, seeking their own interests.

he did it by bringing on folks from the right and then suggesting that they were evil for disagreeing with him.

Only in Washington can the pursuit of a conservative agenda, with centrist policies, be depicted as liberal reform.

Somebody made the point with regard to President Obama that, because he tried to do so much so fast, so extreme on health care, on energy, just run down the list, he went to... the fringe elements of his party to satisfy their demands.

The Republican and Democratic parties have accomplished an amazing feat with the red state/blue state paradigm. They've convinced everyone that regardless of how bad they are, the other guy is worse.

It's hard for a liberal to go on between Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, because it's like doing country music after hip-hop. I mean, just, the audience doesn't go from one to the other.

Hope and Change has become Divide and Conquer.

In this wealthy, technologically advanced, highly educated nation, more and more of our darkest children are dying on the streets--literally. Still, this uncontested reality polarizes adults along racial lines, not as we attempt to discover meaningful solutions to these brutal slaughters but in our racially balkanized expression of beliefs and determinations regarding the cause of these senseless deaths.

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.

Fanaticism means that if you're not against me, you're against me.

The Second World War simplified things like race, and people came down on very clear lines.

The person in New York City is showing too little empathy for the Trump voter. The Trump voter is showing too little empathy for the person who's very worried about the refugee ban. They're not spending enough time with each other to have a meaningful conversation.

The more you observe politics, the more you've got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

Partisanship has gotten worse and worse.

Trump's biggest failure as a political leader is that he sees the worst in people, and he encourages the worst in people.

The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country.