Jonathan Haidt on the Pandemic and America's Polarization - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
The best way to approach this question, he replied, is to look at the trajectory of American democracy over the past decade and a half or so.
-
increasingly concerned by how politically polarized America was becoming, and polarization has only worsened over the past dozen years. “
-
Things change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse; you can’t just extrapolate from the present. “
- ...6 more annotations...
-
“You can’t get compromise. You get exactly the situation that the Founders feared, that [James] Madison wrote about in ‘Federalist 10,’ which is faction, which is people care more about defeating the other side than they do about the common good.”
-
Social media essentially gives a megaphone to the extremes, so it’s very hard to know what most people really think.
-
it’s quite clear that this pandemic is turning into just another culture-war issue, where people on the left see what they want to see and people on the right see what they want to see.”
-
For example, 90 percent of Americans believe that “we’re all in it together,” compared to just 63 percent in the fall of 2018. The share of Americans who describe the country as “unified” has grown from 4 percent in 2018 to 32 percent today
-
Other polls show that the divide between Republicans and Democrats on social-distancing measures isn’t all that large.