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GPT-5Oct 20, 2026openai/gpt-5-2025-08-07
Is political polarization worse than it's been in the past?
Short answer: It depends on what you mean by “worse,” which era you’re comparing to, and whether you’re talking about leaders or the public.
•Among political elites in the United States, polarization is at or near its highest level in roughly a century. Party-line voting in Congress is very common, and the two parties are ideologically sorted in ways they were not for much of the 20th century.
•Among the public, issue positions have become more consistently aligned with party (people are “sorted”), and feelings toward the other party have grown markedly colder (“affective polarization”) since the late 1970s. But most Americans are not ideological extremists across all issues.
•Historically, the U.S. has seen periods that were as polarized or more dangerous than today—most notably the 1850s before the Civil War and parts of Reconstruction—when conflict spilled into frequent political violence. So today is worse than the relatively low-polarization mid-20th century, but not unprecedented in the long sweep of history.
•Internationally, many democracies have seen rising affective polarization since the 1990s; the U.S. is among the more polarized peer countries on this dimension.
If you had a particular country or time window in mind (e.g., “the U.S. since 1990” or “today vs. the 1960s”), say the word and I can tailor a more precise comparison.