11-8-17
Just How Divided Are Americans Since Trump’s Election?
Breaking Newstags: election 2016, Trump
One year after Donald Trump’s upset election victory, it’s not unusual to hear people wonder out loud if the United States is really one country anymore. Last month, the Republican senator from Arizona, Jeff Flake, gave a speech on the Senate floor about the “state of our disunion.”
Recent polls have confirmed that Americans are feeling bitterly split. A Gallup pollconducted just after the 2016 presidential election found 77 percent of Americans see the country as “greatly divided when it comes to the most important values,” up from 66 percent in 2012. A Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, conducted nine months into Trump’s presidency, found that seven in 10 Americans think the nation’s political divisions are as bad as during the Vietnam War.
Some historians are also raising the alarm over division in the country. They say the rise of social media, combined with the decline of the central institutions that once defined the borders of political debate, have created a potentially dangerous moment in our public discourse. Today, even disasters seem to pull us apart more than bring us together. In the wake of mass shootings in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and Las Vegas and the devastation Hurricane Maria caused in Puerto Rico, social media was full of partisan debate over how to think about the events.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Lone Wolves Connected Online: A History of Modern White Supremacy
- 'His Work is a Testament': The Ever-Relevant Photography of Gordon Parks
- History Jobs Stabilized Before COVID-19
- The Stories of Those Who Lost Decades in the Closet
- Archaeologists Unearth Egyptian Queen’s Tomb, 13-Foot ‘Book of the Dead’ Scroll
- This Professor Protested a School’s Racism. Then He Lost His Job
- After the Capitol Was Stormed, Teachers Try Explaining History in Real Time
- Race on Campus: The Mental Burden of Minority Professors
- Against the Consensus Approach to History
- We’ve Had a White Supremacist Coup Before. History Buried It