To Rescue Democracy, Go Outside
When I see a liberal writer’s description of Donald Trump, or a conservative writer’s views of Hillary Clinton, I am embarrassed for them both. I wouldn’t let a 5-year-old child make such impolite and obviously extreme statements—and yet, today, extreme views are often applauded. They are a sign of an increase in polarization and political fragmentation that is happening across the United States.
The Pew Research Center has documented this shift over the last two decades, and shown that Democrats and Republicans have less and less in common with one another (see Drifting Apart).
These changes are visible in the social media sphere, too. There, fragmentation can be measured by identifying the political alignment of users and postings by how much they draw from familiar left-wing and right-wing sources (like Fox News on the right or on the left), and then looking at how ideas and facts are shared across the ideological divide. Facebook researchers have found that most of their users are quite polarized, and don’t
