POLITICAL POLARIZATION

Political polarization is the divergence or political distance between people having different political ideologies; and the increasing opposition between those having dissimilar beliefs.

Political polarization is much more than disagreement on public policies. It turns us against each other. It forces us to think of our country and the world as us versus them. It divides all of us.

Polarization damages all institutions of democracy. Increasingly rigid and extreme mentalities lead to both sides being averse to compromise, which is at the heart of democratic functioning. The consequences of polarization only increase it, thereby creating a vicious cycle.

It also poisons our social interactions, often manifesting as unwillingness to interact with the other side; or, more jarringly, spikes in hate crimes and political violence.

Political polarization is intensified, now more than ever, due to social media. Artificial intelligence technologies can monitor and track every action we take on a social media platform, and they show us content based on this data. Everything all of us see online is different. Different from what our best friends, our parents, or our fellow peers see. We are all living in totally different worlds.

This leads to the creation of echo chambers, where your ideas are reinforced and manipulated by the platform into more extreme agendas. In such a state, you feel repulsed by the opposition, inciting polarization. The truth is both the proposition and the opposition subscribe to different sets of facts, statistics, definitions, and information. They essentially believe in different truths. If we don’t even agree on what the problem is, how can we begin to solve it?

Political polarization is a problem our generation will have to heal from and counter, to come together as a society. Citizens Assemblies allow citizens to deliberate over challenging social or political issues, allowing different groups to find common ground and thus reducing polarization. Institutional reforms such as decentralizing political power are also solutions.

We can reduce polarization by increasing empathy and reducing prejudice. This does not mean convincing the other side; we only have to learn to see each other as humans. There are more things common to all of us than what we are led to believe.