It may feel to Americans that an intense state of us-versus-them is something new, but it’s not. People have been using party as a lens to filter information for decades and beyond. …
Political scientists for decades have thought about party identification as simultaneously being a summary of a person’s positions on issues and also an expression of group identity. An easy way to appreciate how partisanship works as a lens through which people see the world is to consider how people react to the objective state of the nation’s economy. CONT.
Lynn Vavreck (UCLA), New York Times