After all: 2. To cause to concentrate about two conflicting or contrasting positions.
Exactly.
That's all partisanship is.
Two conflicting or contrasting positions.
There nothing intrinsically polarizing about that.
It's possible for people to disagree, to debate two sides of an issue without being polarizing.
Polarizing a group into two sides is an ugly strategy of manipulation, not a result of differing points of view. It can be done among a group of friends, it can happen in a family, the workplace -- doesn't have to be politics or government.
No, it's built into the two-party system and is also found in your polarizing, partisan, ideological attempt at pointing the blame at 'the enemy'. One could trace it back to the abolition movement and its culmination in 1860 if one didn't have an axe to grind against the current administration who only helped master an old trick.
I didn't say Rove/Bush/Cheney invented polarizing politics or divide and conquer strategy. In fact I've pointed many times to earlier uses and, as you have here, credited this administration only with mastering an old trick. But it IS the GOP, not the Democratic Party, that is responsible for this current wave.
Giving you benefit of the doubt, maybe you're too young to remember Lee Atwater. Read about him. Read about Karl Rove's history, and his learning the ropes from Atwater. The polarizing political strategy and use of code words was a Nixon strategy (who, incidentally, learned about polarizing politics at the side of Joe McCarthy) before Atwater but Atwater honed it to a perfectly effective tool, which Rove then took and ran with. Nixon, then Atwater, started with the easiest way to polarize Americans. Racism.
Here's a little taste of Atwater:
Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the [George] Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps…?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, 'N****r, n****r, n****r.' By 1968 you can't say 'n****r' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'N****r, n****r.'
After 9/11 Rove/Bush/Cheney used terrorism to divide Americans into patriotic (those who went along with Bush) and unpatriotic, unAmerican (those who opposed Bush).
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Oops...sorry.
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