The chances are good that if your extended family got together for Thanksgiving dinner this year, there was a bitter political discussion. For Americans, according to Pew Research, values and beliefs are more polarized along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years, perhaps extended even back to the Civil War.

This condition is no accident. It has been intentionally fostered, mostly by conservative interests, and funded by the ever-deepening pockets of the very rich. Studies of the persuasive sciences convinced the rich elite that the public needed to be swayed away from common good issues and toward more divisive thinking that politicians could use to spread rancor and vitriol.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan intentionally used racism to gain voting blocks and to build spite among voters who did not thrive in the inflation-ridden 70s, a period which sported long lines at gas stations, a burgeoning competition with Japan for car sales, and high gas prices.

His race baiting often curried the favor of anti-civil rights whites in the South. Bogus tales of food stamp chiselers and welfare queens tended to employ racist imagery. He told a Southern audience, for example, about a “young buck (buck was derogatory term in the South to denote an African-American man)” using his food stamps to buy T-bone steaks, and in the North it was the “Cadillac-driving” Chicago welfare queen (obviously black).

Such stories drew support from white working class voters, serving as a justification for regressive economic policies. Republicans have their version now: suggesting people in poverty deserve to be there. Times were tougher and dividing Americans was easier, using a phony drug war which was increasingly racist, putting minorities in prison still at a much greater rate, and stoking fear in the law-and-order issue. Thus were born “Reagan Democrats” for the jingoistic, smooth and personable Reagan.

George W. Bush and Bush’s brain, Karl Rove, used wedge issues like gay marriage, welfare, abortion, and also terrorism to fear-whip large portions of the electorate. The terrorist attacks were exploited in a myriad of ways to divide and conquer Americans. The end goal was to pass reactionary legislative programs: 2 wars, privatized Medicare prescriptions, giant tax cuts for the wealthy, labor busting, deregulation and crony capitalism. Everything was done on a national credit card, effectively trying to starve social program in favor of defense and tax breaks for the rich. After Bush, much of this continues, but toward austerity with Obama as president.

The basic goals were control, power and money. That is not to say that polarization was the intended goal in itself. Rather it was in the winning of elections and, more importantly, the takeover of America by the corporate state.

As things stand, polarization will only get worse as the Corporatocracy controls the media, piles money into negative campaigning, with very little disclosure of the money source. Even worse, as things stand now, the organizations buying elections get tax-exempt status as social organizations. Billionaires like the Koch brothers exploit Astroturf groups like the Tea Party to spread a partisan nihilism that cripples government, perpetuating a type of plutocracy not favored by the majority.

Feeding the frenzy of disgust against Obama, for example, is Fox, the right wing media, but the mainstream media has a role as well. A most recent example is the outrage (a varying nightly ritual) expressed by Fox News over President Obama’s handshake with Raul Castro at the memorial for Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Not enough, all news sources recorded the handshake; then almost in the same breath, a video of Obama talking with attractive white Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, followed with a cherry-picked video of Michelle Obama frowning. The conclusion, of course, was a spat between Michele and Barack. Senator John McCain topped it all off with a comparing the handshake of the Castro & Obama with Hitler and PM Chamberlain before WWII.

The GOP has brought about polar classes of makers/takers, rich/poor, Bush’s “with me or against me,” or a no repair / throwaway mentality for goods and people. Current forces, most engineered by conservatives, extend democracy’s dysfunction.

• Basically the media supports one truth, the one that sells audiences. The conservative lie has legs that stand and carry its fabrication due to its GOP spin that is rarely revealed as a fabrication, whether the media source is Fox where the lie is reinforced in perpetuity or the mainstream media which leaves the lie baked through its own reticence. In effect, conservatives plan and use media as a wind-up play toy. The few places the lie is revealed is MSNBC and progressive radio. Otherwise we see and hear a vast sounding board of boast, bias, or bilge.
• Thus Fox and friends provides a confirmation bias captained by Bill O’Reilly and friends where a large audience is told what it wants to believe, effectively filtering out the contrary – a version much closer to the truth.
• Until Reagan, national TV was regulated and subject to licensing, and networks could lose their licenses for biased or inaccurate reporting. With the arrival of cable and the web, news media resembles commercials – like different brands targeted at different segments. Through targeting and segmenting, people are told what they want to hear. There are no feedback loops (e.g., basic science and public policy).
• Then there are filter bubbles used for marketing: For example, Yahoo, Google and Facebook know whether you’re a liberal, a conservative, a birther, a believer in goblins or whatever — information is tailored to information and your own queries that reveal your interests.

·       Then with gerrymandering, Republicans, especially Tea Party Republicans, can effectively thumb their noses at the majority of Americans and shut down the government, even threaten default, knowing there will be few election repercussions. After all they have billionaire money behind them, billionaires like the Koch brothers who want no EPA, no taxes, and no regulation, for example.

Division thrives because American forces divide. There is no common good or general welfare. Our marketing culture divides us into groups, and big money strives to divide our institutions. The right-wing Supreme Court gave us Citizens United which enables billionaires and advocacy groups to demonize others and their ideas. Another ruling allows Southern states to disenfranchise voters. The NRA spends $250 million per year fighting gun control. The Koch brothers spend even more trying to defeat the ACA (“Obamacare”).

George W. Bush and Obama fought 2 wars with 1% of the population. We share very few endeavors. We are geographically segregated from others unlike us.

Our culture begets division, polarization and separation and our politics follow in the same pattern. As a result, the prospects for polarization’s end are not good.