Is the US polarized?

[Michael Costello]

On TV they keep saying the US is polarized, the US is polarized. I'm a bit skeptical of it. In the documentary "The Sorrow and the Pity", a dapper French former fascist in his early 40's talks about how things were polarized in France in the 1930's and 1940's and the film cut to archival footage of clashes between communists and anti-communists in the streets of France. To me, that seems polarized - Spain in the 1930s, Chile in the 1970s, Russia in the 1910s. To me the US doesn't really seem polarized - I'd say the hardcore "don't send the troops to Iraq, period" and now "bring the troops home now" faction, which I consider myself a part of, is not all that large. And the number of strikes and labor disputes are down from what they were in the 1970s, which were not really like the raw class war fights in the US in the 1930s, which even then were soothed by a liberal administration.

Matt Lauer was interviewing Matt Lauer and he was talking about polarization and being "part of the solution or part of the problem". Maybe reading Marx's Capital has taken hold of my brain but I don't really see a big problem of polarization between working people who don't want the US on an course which is imperialist abroad and attacking working people at home (along with scapegoats like gays or whatever), and the wealthy idle class which does and all of their sycophants in this society. To me this polarization seems good, especially if it was really fighting for working class people unlike say the DLC-steeped Democratic leadership of recent years. I just question if it's really there.

Being as more and more people drop off the voting rolls every year, and private union membership percentages drops every year (it's at 8% currently), it seems the trend is not really towards polarization in the psychological sense, although in terms of wealth and so forth things are of course becoming rapidly polarized, and perhaps this will have an effect on people's thinking as the middle class evaporates even more than it already has over the past three decades.

[ThomWV]

1. Not Polarized, Just Stuck For A Moment

But its like a stuck door. You can pull on it for a good while and it doesn't move a bit, but then all of a sudden it comes flying your way and its not stuck a bit anymore.

[Make7]

4. Is polarized.

:)

Make7

[Eric J in MN]

2. public opinion polls which started in the 1980s show

Public opinion polls which started in the 1980s show more polarization between Republicans and Democrats on their opinion of Bush than on any previous person in that office.

[NervousRex]

3. IMHO...it's propaganda.

I give the Ameri-fascists 25%...tops. This is from talking to people. The media likes a horse race and will create it. BBV guarantees the result. I am from MN and woke up in '02 with the Wellstone "incedent" I don't know a soul who didn't vote for Mondale...the "results" were astonishing..the BS about the funeral notwithstanding, the fix was in.