Quotes About Polarization

Why would I be excited that a Democrat won? Seriously, over the past eight years the Democrats didn't do SHIT! Basically, the last eight years, I feel, the Republicans stood around farting; and the Democrats went "Ooh, let me smell it."

I don't know if you noticed, but our two-party system is a bowl of shit looking in the mirror at itself.

Conservatives are branded bigots and we are falsely accused of hate speech when we express traditional values and ideas that have made America the greatest country on Earth.

The language of division can always be monetised.

lo bueno llevado al extremo se convierte en malo.

Extremists usually describe the middle course as extreme.

But unity divides. Unity excludes. Unity polarizes. The corollary of the nation's unity is the elimination of any individuals or groups that disrupt that unity. People who do not concur with the nation's interests and goals, who persist in voicing their own private interests, who threaten the nation's unanimity are considered enemies to be banished or punished. Thus, the Rousseauian yearning for cohesion, solidarity, and oneness imposes the psychology of the purge.

Donald Trump could win the presidency without a popular-vote majority only because both parties have been locked into base-turnout strategies that are partially responsible for our government's ineffectiveness and gridlock.

Because of the structure of the contemporary American party system, every president is polarizing.

If Greece had gone through a very normal political life, I may have not been in politics. But just the fact that I lived through huge upheavals and very difficult struggles and polarization and the barbarism of dictatorships - that made me feel that we had to change this country.

I think, in politics, half the people are gonna like you, and half the people are not gonna like you, no matter what you do or what you say... It's like there are no right answers. If there were, everyone would choose the right answers. They're all opinions.

Opposition always inflames the enthusiast, never converts him.

Wherever you look - especially on social media - we see hate; there is shouting and daily outrage.

As the Right doubles down on anti-anti-Trumpism, it will find itself goaded into defending and rationalizing ever more outrageous conduct just as long as it annoys CNN and the Left.

Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.

There's no discipline or strategy, nothing depersonalized: its mayhem and each side intensely hates the other.

bothsidesism. It's the insistence that whatever excesses of partisanship you may see on the right have an equivalent on the left, that the way forward to solving America's problems is for good centrists of both parties to come together and work things out. All of this is willfully naïve.

Republicans don't just have bad ideas; at this point, they are, necessarily, bad people.

The world has never been as divided as it is now.

Consciously or unconsciously, we carry around concepts of "us" and "them," "right" and "wrong," "worthy" and "unworthy." In this framework, there's not much room for a middle ground; everything is at one pole or another. When groups of people or whole nations get together around these concepts, they can become hugely magnified, which may result in large-scale suffering: discrimination, oppression, war.

Working with polarization and dehumanization won't put an immediate end to the ignorance, violence, and hatred that plague this world. But every time we catch ourselves polarizing with our thoughts, words, or actions, and every time we do something to close that gap, we're injecting a little bodhichitta into our usual patterns. We're deepening our appreciation for our interconnectedness with all others.

anybody who tried to sound the alarm was branded a far-right, racist xenophobe

The left's obsession with judging us on immutable characteristics is what will eventually reach a tipping point and turn neighbor against neighbor, dividing America . . . and beyond.

the left invents problems to fill the void.