Looking at the Election Through Polarized Lenses?

What kind of pluralists do we want to be? Most of the time when we talk about the political challenge of pluralism, we are really talking about something else: polarization. Pluralism assumes that deep diversity is a fact of public life. It envisions public squares filled with citizens whose attitudes, values, and even worldviews diverge in myriad ways. The goal of pluralism—its normative aspiration—is to build a common life out of that dizzying diversity. Politics, of course, is a key mechanism for achieving that goal. But the political response to the challenge of pluralism is most often to flatten diversity into just a few partisan attachments that are easier to manage and mobilize. And these attachments are most potent when they are polarized—that is, when they result in ever-deeper divisions that move people to the ideological extremes.