Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America

By James E. Campbell

Many continue to believe that the United States is a nation of political moderates. In fact, it is a nation divided. It has been so for some time and has grown more so. This book provides a new and historically grounded perspective on the polarization of America, systematically documenting how and why it happened.

Polarized presents commonsense benchmarks to measure polarization, draws data from a wide range of historical sources, and carefully assesses the quality of the evidence. Through an innovative and insightful use of circumstantial evidence, it provides a much-needed reality check to claims about polarization. This rigorous yet engaging and accessible book examines how polarization displaced pluralism and how this affected American democracy and civil society.

Polarized challenges the widely held belief that polarization is the product of party and media elites, revealing instead how the American public in the 1960s set in motion the increase of polarization. American politics became highly polarized from the bottom up, not the top down, and this began much earlier than often thought. The Democrats and the Republicans are now ideologically distant from each other and about equally distant from the political center. Polarized also explains why the parties are polarized at all, despite their battle for the decisive median voter. No subject is more central to understanding American politics than political polarization, and no other book offers a more in-depth and comprehensive analysis of the subject than this one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jul 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781400883448

James E. Campbell

James Campbell, M.D. was born in farm country in Central Western Illinois. He graduated co-valedictorian from Warsaw High School; then he went to MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill. for three years before being accepted to Univ. of Iowa, University of Ill, and St. Louis University Medical schools. He chose to go to St. Louis Univ. for medical school, and then to Michael Reese in Chicago for one year of a medical internship and his basic three year adult psychiatric residency training. In 1971, after two years in the Air Force, he set up a private practice in Phoenix, Arizona. Because of the rapid turn over of patients in his office, an outcome of the use of rapid relief principles, he decided to extend the nature of his practice by taking a two year child fellowship at UCLA. It was there where he met Dr. Gary Emery whom he later collaborated with to write the original Rapid Relief from Emotional Distress. Dr. Campbell has a revision of the first book Rapid Relief from Emotional Distress Revised; this book Psychological Therapy in a Pharmacological World: a book intended for physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists or counselors, and a third book Teachers and Mental Health: The art of accurate speech and other ways to help students not become psychiatric patients intended for teachers and parents is in the final stages.