Charles Hayes: When the hot-button issues that divide us become the preoccupation of media in order to gain audience share, the result is intense demographic polarization.
The Polarizing Political Paradox Redux
Claude Fischer: Political scientists have long established that most Americans cannot reliably identify which specific policies each party supports, that people adopt party loyalties quite early in life, and that most stick to those loyalties whatever happens.
Neil Munro’s Incivility
Karen FInney: Rather than helping to further understanding about the policy being announced, Munro engaged in exactly the kind of provocative-for-the-sake-of-it “journalism” that cheapens our national debate on important issues.
From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy the Neighborhoods
Paul Loeb: Nothing stops the Occupiers and their supporters from can raising their key issues as clearly and powerfully as possible, while reminding people that showing up at the polls still matters.
Beware of the Racial Demagoguery
Carl Bloice: With public opinion across the political spectrum clearly opposed to slashing the healthcare and retirement programs, any negotiated settlement would be undemocratic.
Gay is NOT the New Black
If you are African American and gay, and fighting alongside your white LGBTQ brothers and sisters for queer civil rights, the notion that “gay is the new black” is not only absurdly arrogant, it is also dangerously divisive. In a presumably “post-racial” era with the country’s first African American president-elect, it’s easy for some to […]
