Divided by symbols, Americans see a ‘serious threat’ across the aisle

“An annual survey of American attitudes about politics and values released Tuesday found, to no one’s surprise, that the nation’s divisions are growing dangerously deep and wide.

More than half the people in both the Republican and Democratic parties see the other side as a “serious threat to the country,” the American Values Survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found. At a panel discussion at the Brookings Institution to discuss the poll findings, Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said a “pre-Spanish Civil War mentality” was taking hold among voters.

The word “war” itself was mentioned numerous times by the panelists, in reference to the way both left and right see politics now as a zero-sum fight…

If the answer is basically to build a wall around populism, what you simply do is build up tension, build up the partisanship. And then, if you go through some sort of economic decline that makes even more people despairing, you raise the possibility of a much more dangerous counterreaction.”

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