I don’t consider polarization, on its own, to be a problem. Just as often it’s a solution. America’s modern run of polarization has its roots in the civil rights era, in the Democratic Party choosing to embrace racial equality and the Republican Party providing a home to white backlash. Surely the polarization that followed that progress was preferable to the oppression that preceded it. In a multiparty system, polarization is sometimes required for our political disagreements to express themselves. The alternative to polarization often isn’t consensus but suppression. We don’t argue over the
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