Even in this most partisan and dysfunctional of eras, we can all agree on one thing: Washington is broken. Polticians take increasingly inflexible and extreme positions, leading to gridlock, partisan warfare, and the sense that our seats of government are nothing but cesspools of rancor, childishness, and paralysis. The shocking reality, though, is that modern polarization was a deliberate project carried out by Democratic and Republican activists. In The Polarizers, Sam Rosenfeld details why bipartisanship was seen as a problem in the postwar period and how polarization was cast as the solution. Republican and Democrats feared that they were becoming too similar, and that a mushy consensus imperiled their agendas and even American democracy itself. Thus began a deliberate move to match ideology with party label - with the vexed results we now endure. Rosenfeld reveals the specific politicians, intellectuals, and operatives who worked together to heighten partisan discord, showing that our system today is a product not solely of gradual structural shifts but of deliberate actions motivated by explicit agendas. Rosenfeld makes clear that the story of Washington's transformation is driven both by institutional change and by grassroots influences on the left and the right. The Polarizers brilliantly challenges and overturns our conventional narrative about partisanship, but perhaps most importantly, it points us toward a new consensus: if we deliberately created today's dysfunctional environment, we can deliberately change it. -- from dust jacket.