It depends on the metric, country, and timeframe, but in the contemporary United States many standard indicators show elevated polarization relative to the mid-to-late 20th century—though not necessarily worse than the most extreme historical peaks (e.g., the 1850s–1860s).
Key Distinctions
•Ideological polarization: Divergence in policy positions or values.
•Affective polarization: Emotional dislike, distrust, or loathing of the other side (often stronger recently).
•Elite vs. mass: Politicians, activists, and media are typically more polarized than the general public. Issue positions among ordinary voters often show more overlap than rhetoric suggests, but partisan sorting (liberals in one party, conservatives in the other) and negative partisanship have risen.
•Behavioral outcomes: Rhetoric, social distance, and institutional hardball vs. actual political violence or civil conflict.
U.S. Evidence (Most-Studied Case)
•Congress and elites: Nominate/DW-Nominate scores and similar measures show the parties in Congress more ideologically distant than at any point since the late 19th century/Civil War era. The mid-20th century (roughly 1930s–1970s) was an unusually depolarized period with more cross-cutting cleavages and conservative Democrats/liberal Republicans. Polarization re-accelerated from the 1970s–1990s onward with southern realignment, primary incentives, donor networks, and media changes. See work by Poole/Rosenthal, McCarty, Barber, and others.
•Public attitudes: Pew, ANES, and other long-running surveys document growing partisan gaps on many issues, stronger party-ideology alignment, and especially rising affective polarization (e.g., viewing the other party as a threat, unwilling to marry across lines, colder feeling thermometers). This accelerated in the 1990s–2010s. Social media and fragmented media ecosystems amplify extremes and out-party animus more than they create underlying issue disagreement from scratch.
•Not uniform: On some specific issues the public remains closer than elites; “polarization” sometimes reflects better sorting rather than everyone racing to the poles. Rural/urban, education, and religious divides have sharpened as overlapping cleavages.
•Historical comparison: The lead-up to the Civil War, Reconstruction violence, the 1890s labor/populist conflicts, and the 1960s–1970s (assassinations, riots, Weather Underground, campus bombings, intense Vietnam/civil rights clashes) involved far higher political violence and institutional rupture risk. Today’s affective hostility and institutional hardball (debt ceiling brinkmanship, norm-breaking, lawfare) are serious and corrosive but occur in a wealthier, more stable state with lower overall political murder rates than those peaks. Claims of “worst ever” usually fail when violence or secession risk is the yardstick.
Drivers (Not Exhaustive)
•Realignment and sorting after the civil rights era.
•Primary systems, gerrymandering debates, and geographic clustering.
•Nationalized media + social media reward outrage and reduce cross-cutting exposure.
•Rising national stakes (federal government scope) make losses feel existential.
•Elite incentives and activist overrepresentation.
•Economic/cultural status anxieties that map onto parties.
These are not unique to one party; both sides have contributed via rhetoric, institutional tactics, and base mobilization. Cross-national work (e.g., boxell et al. on affective polarization) finds the U.S. increase is relatively sharp among wealthy democracies, though other places have their own severe episodes (interwar Europe, various civil conflicts).
Caveats and Counterpoints
•Visibility ≠ novelty: 24/7 news and social media make conflict more salient than in eras of three networks or local papers.
•Some “polarization” is competent disagreement on hard trade-offs (immigration scale, fiscal policy, cultural norms) rather than pure irrationality.
•Measurement artifacts exist (survey priming, activist over-samples).
•Other countries show different patterns; some multiparty systems diffuse affect differently.
•Trends can reverse: depolarization has happened before when cross-cutting issues or external shocks dominate.
Bottom line: Relative to the post-WWII U.S. baseline, yes—elite polarization and mass affective polarization are worse and have measurable costs for governance, trust, and social cohesion. Relative to the full sweep of U.S. or world history, no; earlier periods produced deadlier outcomes. The practical problem is the combination of high negative partisanship with modern institutions, media, and state capacity. For data, start with Pew’s long-term political typology/polarization reports, ANES feeling thermometers, and congressional ideology projects.