The News: Forgive Them, For They Know Not What They Do. (Well, Actually...)
Wednesday's Child is Full of Woe
Thomas Edsall at the New York Times has a useful overview of a significant branch of thought in contemporary political science about “affective polarization”, quoting the essay “Political Sectarianism in America”, which defines that term as “a poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion and morality”. (Finkel, Eli J., Christopher A. Bail, Mina Cikara, Peter H. Ditto, Shanto Iyengar, Samara Klar, Lilliana Mason, et al. “Political Sectarianism in America.” Science 370, no. 6516 (October 30, 2020): 533–36. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe1715.)
The basic problem with a good deal of this work are the foundational assumptions that drive it. To wit: