With the nation gripped by impeachment hearings, anger and tribalism appear to be at an all-time high,

creating political and societal rifts that seem unbridgeable. Last fall, I spoke with

Lilliana Mason, a political psychologist at the University of Maryland, about the reasons

behind the party tribalism and enmity that characterize

our politics. She told me that only 70 years ago, the country was deemed by political

scientists to be not polarized enough, leading to confusion and disengagement on the part

of the electorate. Yes. In the best possible way, parties are what we call heuristics. So there are cognitive

shortcuts that we use to make political decisions because we can't ask our citizens to read

every page of every bill that comes before Congress. And so parties have been a useful way for

people to make pretty easy and quick political choices.

In 1950, the American Political Science Association put out a report recommending that our parties

were not distinct enough from each other and that they therefore did not provide a clear

enough choice for voters and that it was making people's political decision-making

too difficult. So if the Republicans weren't the Conservative Party 70 years ago, what were they?

In the 1950s, this is pre-Civil Rights Act. The two parties were effectively a mixture of liberals and conservatives.

The Republican Party, up until that point, really had been the party of the North.

The Republicans had been the party of Abraham Lincoln and the Union, while the South was the Confederacy, the Democratic Party,

represented a collection of conservative southerners, as well as some more economically liberal

northerners, whereas the Republican Party was a northern, northern, economically conservative

party, but still had plenty of relatively liberal people in it.

So what caused the change? Was it Nixon's Southern strategy to coalesce a base based largely on racial fear?

Was it the long list of culture wars battles that had already begun, from the Civil Rights Act to Miranda,

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