… Under the heading “Two Cultures” [Howard] Fineman writes: “Americans used to inhabit a world of shared social mores, even if millions of people were coerced into accepting them. Now voters now live in two barely overlapping moral worlds: Secular Metropolitan America and Biblical Traditional America. Americans can spend most of their waking hours enveloped in one journalistic gestalt or another, staring at one cable show/website version of reality or the other. It makes political differences harder to bridge.” …
The problem, of course, is that the evidence indicates that Americans are not polarized along party lines – at least not any more than they were five decades ago. Indeed, if anything, they are perhaps less polarized, particularly when it comes to cultural issues. [cont.]
Matthew Dickinson, Middlebury College