Milbank has a heartrending piece on Republican pols' inhuman, inhumane, unconscionable policy of denying Medicaid's expansion into the state of North Carolina, with predictable consequences: needless deaths and deprivations. North Carolina's mean-spirited Republican politics may be a grim reality, but it's also a metaphor for the malevolence of contemporary conservatism. Once blue--in 2008--the state has since excelled at an anti-Obama ruthlessness that astonishes; it is literally willing to kill its citizens to prove both an ideological point and its immovable opposition to the White House Pretender. Others have joined N.C. in this ignominious crusade.
Question: Is it proper to call opposition to N.C. et al's determined program of rank inhumanity mere "polarization"? The term seems awfully mild in the face of deliberate murder--which is what N.C.'s and other GOP states' refusal of Medicaid expansion is. It is a premeditated killing; there was never any doubt that lives would be needlessly lost because of Republicans' deranged hostility to Medicaid's expansion through Obamacare, and yet Republicans have proceeded to block it. Because of cost? No. The feds pick up nearly the entire tab, after a few years of in fact picking up the entire tab. Because of unworkability? No. It's working just fine elsewhere. Because of criminal malice? Bingo.
To stand polar-opposite to that sort of political malignancy is nonetheless not what I'd call polarization. I'd call it human decency. One side has it, and the other does not. Polarization occurs when, say, one side favors more inexcusable tax cuts for plutocrats and the other side philosophically opposes the absurdity of such cuts. Polarization does not occur when one side favors the murder of its fellow citizens, and the other side, ahem, objects.