Polarization has marked campaign season entering its last weekend

The final weekend of an accelerated 2022 campaign season in Illinois began against the backdrop of intense partisan polarization, as voters continued to be fed an ever increasing level of anger-stoking political invective.

Disagreement over issues has given way to accusations that division is intentionally being fomented. Partisan ideologies have become more rigid as voters reward candidates for displaying unwavering fealty and rejecting pragmatism. Truth and institutions like the electoral process are under siege. Intimidation, threats and physical violence are becoming more common against those considered the enemy. It is a national template that has reached to Illinois.

“We’re facing a defining moment, an inflection point,” President Joe Biden said in a national speech just days before he traveled to Illinois on Friday to boost suburban congressional Democrats in tightening races.

“There’s been anger before in America. There’s been division before in America. But we have never given up on the American experiment and we can’t do that now,” he said.

Biden’s speech on Wednesday came after a violent assault on Paul Pelosi, the husband of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It also was delivered on the same day that a Chicago man was arrested for making a death threat against state Sen. Darren Bailey of Xenia, the Republican challenger for governor.

“The violent rhetoric and division we’re seeing across our country is unacceptable,” Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker tweeted. “Hatred in any form has no home in Illinois.”

In response, Bailey blamed the threat on the governor, who also has received threats. The Republican called it “exactly the product of J.B. Pritzker’s, you know, his divisiveness and his rhetoric.”

The campaign for governor has seen plenty of highflying epithets, notably in the final broadcast debate between Pritzker and Bailey, during which each labeled the other an “extremist.”

“Darren Bailey has surrounded himself with racist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic people and organizations, including chasing after the chief among them, Donald Trump,” Pritzker said.

The governor called Bailey a “threat to democracy” who “shouldn’t be let anywhere near the governor’s office.”

Bailey, in turn, said the problem was Pritzker, who “during his four years in office has created so much division and hate in this state with racial ideas and ideologies.”

“It’s all Gov. Pritzker can do, he’s ate up with Donald Trump and (former GOP Gov.) Bruce Rauner and Republicans. The man wants to divide us as a nation,” Bailey said. “Divide, divide, divide. That’s all you can do.”

Bailey, who was endorsed by Trump, continued that theme on Friday in calling attention to Biden’s trip to the suburbs, saying “the Pritzker-Biden agenda is focused on dividing Americans and focusing on polarizing national issues and extreme policies.”

While perhaps reaching new heights, the polarization laid bare in campaigns including the one for governor predates the tumultuous times of Trump, as the nation’s political parties in recent decades lost internal diversity and politicians adhered to a more strict party ideology — in part to survive potential primary challenges.

“The Democratic Party had both the most conservative and the most liberal people up until 1980. And to a lesser extent, you had variety in the Republican Party” with northeastern moderates and Midwest conservatives both in the fold, said Christopher Mooney, a political scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Under that structure, there were overlapping interests between members in each party, making compromises more achievable, Mooney said. But now, under firm party dictates, compromise is viewed as equivalent to political surrender, leading to politicians taking intractable positions, he said.

Added to that are the huge injections of money into campaigns that followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling equating political contributions with free speech.

The dependence on the ultrawealthy has been especially pronounced in Illinois, where Rauner, an equity investor, bankrolled the state Republican Party and GOP legislative candidates during his brief tenure, and was succeeded by Pritzker, an entrepreneur and billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotels fortune who has similarly funded Democrats.

Bailey, a wealthy farmer, has benefited from an allied political action committee that is almost entirely funded by ultraconservative megadonor Richard Uihlein, the billionaire founder of the Uline office supply and packaging company.

The reliance on a few wealthy individuals has upended traditional political fundraising.

“Both parties have really been decimated in terms of their structure and underlying ability to raise money,” Mooney said.

Then came Trump, who thrived on a bellicose attitude toward any opposition by stoking fears about their motives among voters, who held a contentious view of government institutions and who portrayed himself as a political victim to appeal to those who felt neglected by government.

“Trump’s not the cause of this. He took advantage of this. He weaponized the division and exacerbated it,” Mooney said of the current state of politics. “He’s basically a showman and he knows how to pull the strings.”

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