United States: A Polarized Nation in Recent Term Paper

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United States: A Polarized Nation

In recent decades, the United States had become a far more self-interested nation, that is, a nation in which most people are more concerned with their own interests, or their own small group's interest (e.g., the AARP lobby; the pro-life movement) than with the interests of the nation as a whole. As a result, the United States as a country is now more polarized than ever before, around special interests such as these. In this essay I will discuss polarization within the United States, in terms of political parties as well as other matters.

The extent of America's polarization, along political lines, may be most plainly seen through the results of U.S. Presidential elections within in the past two decades. The last two landslide presidential elections were won by Ronald Reagan in 1980, against Jimmy Carter, and then again by Reagan in 1984, against Walter Mondale. Since then, the winner-loser margins in U.S. Presidential elections have been decreasing. The best example of this is the 2000 Presidential election, in which Republican candidate George W. Bush defeated Democratic candidate Al Gore only within the Electoral College, and in which Gore actually won the popular vote. In the 2004 election, Bush beat challenger John Kerry by more popular votes (and electoral votes), but still received only slightly over half the popular vote -- hardly a national mandate.

Increasingly, many U.S. voters are "one issue" voters, and will support the candidate who supports their own stance on, say, abortion, or the death penalty, or gun control. Since support (or the lack thereof) for these issues tends to cleave along party lines (more so than in the past, in many respects) people nowadays find themselves voting for an issue, which often polarizes voters by party as well. Another aspect of current polarization in American party politics that became apparent during the 2004 presidential election, even though it was won by a slightly wider margin than was the 2000 presidential election, was just how strongly Democrats and Republicans disagreed with one another on issues (e.g., the war in Iraq), and just how defensive, if not downright angry, they became, during the course of the election, about one another's perspectives.

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Before in American presidential politics, the opposing sides have at least respected, if not liked or agreed with each others' viewpoints. In the 2004 election, however, the Republicans accused the Democrats of being unpatriotic if they did not support the war in Iraq, while the Democrats accused the Republicans of being morons for simple-mindedly supporting it. Unfortunately, such attitudes do not vanish when a presidential election is over; I daresay that there is more personal animosity, based on opposing political viewpoints, between Democrats and Republicans than ever before.

There are, of course, gradations of "Democrat" and "Republican." Everyone has heard of conservative Democrats (John F. Kennedy would, in his time, have been an example of one) and liberal Republicans (Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania is one of these). One U.S. Senator, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, even changed political parties altogether while in the U.S. Senate. But in terms of what people actually vote for or against (and talk, argue, and debate about) it is not "centrist" issues, on which one could be either a Democrat or a Republican, but instead more polarizing issues, like, again, the death penalty, abortion, gun control, or other special interests that tend, in general, to split along party lines.

There is also much less of a sense of a shared community or a national identity, of which everyone is a part, than in the past within the United States. People, in general, are less interested in each other, and what they have in common, than they are in themselves and those close to them, and what….....

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