Political “Polarization” Was Never the Problem

Do we really need more “centrists” in a genocidal empire?

The November issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science just landed in my inbox, and with it, a piece of political psychology research that’s so out-of-touch with our current political reality that it feels like it’s from a completely different era:

In a series of three studies, psychologists Lukas Wolf & Paul Hanel surveyed over 2,000 American Republicans & Democrats about their ‘fundamental values,’ and concluded that adherents to each party actually have a lot more in common with one another than they do sources of disagreement.

This lack of a meaningful difference between the two parties is, somehow, taken by the authors to be a positive and “hopeful” finding. Bizarrely, within a political paradigm in which over five million immigrants have been deported in the past four years, trans healthcare and abortion access are increasingly restricted, and $17.9 billion has been dispatched to Israel in the past year to support bombings in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, what many liberal political analysts consider to be most important is that members of the two parties don’t disagree with one another too much.

It seems to completely elude the authors’ grasp that it’s not necessarily a positive…