There are numerous recent examples of how this works. The destruction of congressional bipartisanship in the United States in the 1990s; the arrival of the conspiracy-minded Law and Justice Party in the center of Polish politics in 2005; the Brexit vote in 2016: all of these polarizing moments radicalized a part of the population in their respective countries. As Stenner puts it, “The more the messages conflict with one another, the angrier these people feel.”
