American’s Political Polarization Traces Back to 18th-Century Enlightenment Factions That Never Resolved Their Differences

History Unplugged Podcast · Oct 28, 2021 · 44m

Pundits on both the left and right proclaim our democracy is in crisis. This can be characterized by an eroding of civil institutions or politicians completely ignoring democratic norms by doing whatever is necessary to seek power and asking “where are the nuclear launch codes?” However, these challenges may not be so new. And the fault lines in our society may be centuries old and stem back to the beginning of the Enlightenment, when scholars asked fundamental questions of how we know what is and isn’t true, and how do we order our society along those principles. Different intellectuals had…