America’s Return to Political Polarization
Writing in The Fiscal Times, Bruce Bartlett offers a historian’s response to “the most talked-about article in Washington this week.” He refers to an op-ed in The Washington Post from political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Orstein, entitled “Let’s Just Say It: Republicans Are the Problem.” Bartlett blames the current political polarization on the extinction of the Southern Democrat; he traces the roots of this shift to back before the Civil War, to the slave-holding South, its Biblical literalism and deeply held conservatism.