The Real Extremists

Political Scene: Republican Extremism and the Future of American Politics : The New Yorker

At least since President Obama’s Inauguration, political observers have been taking note of the Republican Party’s trend toward the right, and away from compromise. “After 2010, it was impossible for a fair-minded person who knew what was going on in Washington and around the country to maintain the fiction that there was an equivalent extremism, and polarization, and ugliness on both sides,” George Packer says in this week’s Political Scene podcast. But there was an impulse among pundits and citizens alike to believe that Democrats, too, bear some of the blame for the country’s polarization, an impulse only now beginning to fade. Packer joins Amy Davidson and host Amelia Lester to discuss why that’s happening, and how extreme conservatism is affecting American politics and governance...