Divided Nation

Gun ownership correlates strongly with who you voted for last year. Heather Digby Parton reports on a Pew poll showing a growing partisan split.

The poll first started asking 10 specific questions about political values 23 years ago and at the time there was a 15 point difference between the two parties. In 2014 it was 33 points. Today it's up to 36.

Neal Gabler argues that the biggest divide is cultural.

[O]f all the divisions that cleave America today, the single most important one may be not racial, religious, political or economic. It may be cultural. America is deeply divided between those who are considered (and consider themselves) winners, and those who ... are considered by the winners to be losers.

[T]his terrible taxonomy isn’t just bloviating. It cuts across all the other divisions. It eats at the fiber of America. It undermines us psychologically and even physically. It creates a gulf so wide that it is unbridgeable. And it does so while justifying the damage it inflicts, allowing the so-called winners and their fellow travelers to deny assistance to the needy .... After all, never forget that losers deserve what they get.

John Feffer warns that the implications are international.

The power of nation-states is eroding. If this trend continues, with the world continuing to splinter, the only entities left with any global power will be corporations and religious organizations, a world where frightened people pray to Facebook and the gods of Google that the fierce winds of nationalism and the rising waters of climate change and the random fire of lone gunmen will stay away for one more day.

Update (October 28):  Pew divides the United States into nine groups.

And Robert Reich boils it down to six "political parties". Governing depends on a coalition among these groups: establishment Republicans, anti-establishment Republicans, social conservative Republicans, establishment Democrats, anti-establishment Democrats, and the party of von Clownstick.

Update (October 30):  John Boehner has some thoughts about our political divide.

People thought in ’09, ’10, ’11, that the country couldn’t be divided more. And you go back to Obama’s campaign in 2008, you know, he was talking about the divide and healing the country and all of that. And some would argue on the right that he did more to divide the country than to unite it. I kind of reject that notion.

[I]t wasn’t him! It was modern-day media, and social media, that kept pushing people further right and further left. People started to figure out … they could choose where to get their news. And so what do people do? They choose places they agree with, reinforcing the divide.