As my blog has discussed, political polarization in the United States has been an ongoing problem since political parties came into play. However, in more recent years the United States has become increasingly divided. In this post, I want to discuss ways in which we can still have political parties without having such a strong divide.

1. The first way we can reduce the divide is by holding our parties responsible. What does this exactly mean? This means acknowledging when your own members are taking politics to a disrespectful level. For example, if someone from a democratic party continues to insult someone for being republican, it is important that members of that party realize that they need to stand up. Furthermore, if someone from the republican party calls a liberal an insulting term, members of that party need to hold the other person accountable.
2. The second way we can reduce the divide is to advocate for non-bias new stations. The influence of polarized media has contributed to the rapid divide amongst people. For example, Fox is definitely a right-wing station. The way they provide information is biased to the right-wing and creates stereotypical ideologies of republicans that increase the divide. CNN on the other hand is a democratic leaning station that presents information with a liberal bias. These types of stations reinforces stereotypes that each party has about the other party. Therefore, it increases the divide rather than presenting new media in a non biased way.
3. The third way we can reduce polarization is to stop labeling policies as left/right   winged policies. For example, the issue of abortion has two sides that belong to each party. Anti-abortion is a right wing issue and the pro-abortion issue is a left-winged issue. Organizing these issues to specific groups is what causes a divide. It allows people to categorize others into specific groups. When this happens it leads people into only accepting policies that their party proposes. It becomes an issue because will not be open to the idea of discussion or hearing others opinions. This creates an issue in our democracy because people aren’t willing to respect the opinions of others.

When it comes to political polarization there is no way to completely eliminate it. Unfortunately, political polarization has increased so rapidly that it interferes with who we interact with. We can focus on how to reduce it and educating others about the impacts polarization has.