Biden and the Looming Midterms – Week Three: The Great Divide: Policy Making in Polarized Times

From charged school board meetings to shouting matches in Congress, on social media platforms, and increasingly partisan media outlets, the level of incivility and outright hostility to anyone with views opposed to one’s own are alarming and unproductive. Real policy debates and compromise cannot be accomplished in an environment in which participants ascribe malign intent or even dehumanize others. Polarization in the United States has created both legislative stasis at the federal level and also widened the red state/blue state gulf, all contributing to a widespread lack of trust in democratic institutions by voters. How did we get here? How will our democracy recover? How can we get out of it? President Biden promised a return to civility in his Inaugural Address. Has he made any headway?

Our evening’s panel of nationally recognized experts is, Scott Klug, former Republican U. S. Representative for Wisconsin’s 2^nd congressional district, Larry LaRocco, former Democratic U. S. Representative for Idaho’s 1^st congressional district, and Jennifer McCoy, Ph.D., professor of political science at Georgia State University and nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The evening’s moderator is Arjun Singh, audio producer covering politics, The Washington Post.