Crooked. Sleazy. Corrupt. Sleepy. Crazy. Liar. Weakling. Racist. Extremist. Terrorist.
No, it’s not the playground where you will hear these words thrown around the most, but in just about any conversation about politics.
“We’re seeing record breaking polarization,” Colorado Mesa University (CMU) political scientist, Dr. Justin Gollob, said. “The only time that would match in terms of polarization would be the Industrial Revolution—talking after the 1860s.”
No matter where you go or what you believe in, it seems that day to day life is meshed with aggressive politics. To drive on a road without passing explicitly political signs, to go through Instagram without someone telling you to unfollow them if you disagree with their politics or to meet someone new without slipping a political sleight of hand feels nearly impossible.
“Everyone is so one sided on everything, and it’s like ‘if you don’t agree with me, then screw you’ type of situation,” first year Pre-Nursing Major, Alec Thudium, said. “It feels kind of dividing right now. It’s frustrating to me.”
For many of us, the increased aggression in politics is mistaken as a trend brought on in recent years, but it’s actually a recurring theme in United States history for many reasons.
“Americans, and particularly politicians, are very fond of calling on this mythical past where there was civility, and people agreed, but that never existed,” CMU history professor, Dr. Sarah Swedberg, said. “It’s not like there was a time where everyone was together and unified in their ideas […] Even some main authors of the constitution disagree on what they were creating, and there was a lot of controversy and various interpretations of course after it went into place as well.”
As it turns out, one reason why the polarization of United States politics occurs often is because it was unintentionally built into the political system we operate to this day.
“The dualistic nature of our politics is interesting,” CMU political scientist, Dr. Tim Casey, said. “Political parties are not mentioned in the constitution. It’s as if they didn’t really plan for that, but it turns out it’s one of the best strategies for achieving your goals given the political institution that we have set up.”
Gallob argued another major influence on this is the use of redistricting and gerrymandering.
“Redistricting is the process of redrawing the boundaries, and gerrymandering is the purposeful redrawing to advantage or disadvantage [of] one group,” Gollob said. “The rules of the game in part determine the plausible outcomes. And in this case, gerrymandering and primary elections play a big piece.”
Although insult politics is almost ingrained into United States politics, there is a surprisingly simple way to reach a more civilized form of politics.
“What I would really encourage people to do is to engage their fellow human beings and to begin this kind of dialogue,” Casey said. “Let’s talk about these issues. Let’s not run away from anybody that sounds different than us because when we do that, we make the problem worse, and we don’t come to any solutions.”
As it turns out, this solution is both simple in nature and easily applied from practice in normal social situations.
“If there’s an argument between people, regardless of what it’s about, I always make sure to see what each person is talking about first, and get both views of it, because I feel that it just makes it more realistic,” Thudium said.
When it seems that a political fight to the death is inevitable, it can be difficult to see what the point of communication with one another is, but with the adaptation of this idea, civilized political discourse can become a reality.
“It is that relationship that we build with people across the other aisle that is going to get us out of this,” Casey said.
