It may be hard to remember, but there was a time when politics in America weren’t so polarized. Political scholar Sam Rosenfeld says that if we can understand how our dysfunctional politics were deliberately created, maybe we can deliberately change them.
It may be hard to remember, but there was a time when politics in America weren’t just crazy polarized. But in the years after World War II, polarization wasn’t the problem: it was actually the solution. Political scientist Sam Rosenfeld has studied how Democrats and Republicans worked to match ideologies with party labels for the good of democracy. Rosenfeld says that if we can understand how we deliberately created today’s dysfunctional politics, maybe we can deliberately change them.
Sam Rosenfeld is an assistant professor of political science at Colgate University. His first book is called The Polarizers: Postwar Architects of Our Partisan Era. [Indie bookstores|Amazon].
