Quotes About Polarization

I think Donald Trump taps into an anger that I hear every day. People are angry that a commonsense thing like securing the border or ending sanctuary cities is somehow considered extreme. It's not extreme; it's common sense. We need to secure the border.

Trump is an anathema to America's democracy and values.

If you really hate George Bush, you don't want to read about his hobbies or that he's nice to his friends or that he's good company at dinner.

The administration still wants to govern from the far-left and that's going to produce kind a partisan result here in the Congress.

McCain is the most unifying figure in the Senate. Barack Obama is so far left. Turning to her co-host, Joy Behar, an Obama supporter, she said: Do you want some more Barack Obama Kool-Aid, or what?

The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.

One of the hallmarks of the Trump era is the alacrity with which intelligent people embrace stupidity.

Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy. It isn't the quiet fans in the stands who get on television but the lunatics who paint their bodies with the team colors and go shirtless on frigid days.

Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation.

I think the Republican Party has moved substantially to the right, particularly on social issues... And the Democratic Party has moved to the left over the past decades. So we've got a lot more room in the middle.

The national debate on Social Security has been cheapened by demagoguery on all sides.

I've never seen a constructive Social Security debate that started with one side digging in, in one place and another side digging into another.

We can't afford to go down the dead end roads of Parliamentary Socialism or Fascistic Bolshevism.

I am angry that the Democrats don't have the ability to explain to Republicans that we should be able to feed people in this country, and that is not socialism.

Republicans paint everything that Democrats have been for as socialism, too far to the left, as extreme, and it didn't matter how moderated it was; it didn't matter that Obamacare started out as a compromise. You might as well say what you're actually for and show what you really are.

I've been called communist, socialist, anti-American.

I think the Right did us a service calling Obama a socialist for eight years. It inoculated us.

It could fairly be said that the U.S. is increasingly out of step with the rest of the world. As our neighbors to the south elect left-wing or even socialist governments, we are lurching further to the right. As Europe becomes less engaged to the Church, we are becoming more fundamentalist.

Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?

Both parties are so entrenched in their ideologies and a desire to score political points and hold on to power that we never seem to agree on a problem, much less find solutions.

Extremist, closed communities are ripe for violence.

When politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as 'enemies,' it's time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country.

when like-minded people get together, they often end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk to one another.

They suggest that with respect to facts, partisan differences are much less sharp than they seem—and that political polarization is often an artifact of the survey setting.