Political Extremism

The politics of hate

How has this come about? The contributing factors have been accelerating and converging for years: Gerrymandered House districts. Political realignments that drive Democrats from the South and Republicans from the Northeast.

And perhaps most of all: greater mobilization by both parties' ideological wings, who punish those who dare cooperate with the other side.

House and Senate members once saw the opposition party as the adversary, but now they consider it the outright enemy, said Norman J. Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Americans "are dividing into tribes more than we did before," he said. Voters have driven virtually all liberals out of the Republican Party and all conservatives from the Democratic Party, eliminating a political dynamic that helped enact major legislation such as civil rights and Medicare in earlier decades.

 Excerpted from this article