ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines and defends a ‘toolkit approach’ to political polarization. This approach sees polarization as a tool or strategy employed by political actors as a means of achieving their political objectives. Understood as a condition, polarization often results from the effective employment of the tools in the polarization toolkit. These tools include: myth-making, stereotyping, polarizing speech, propaganda, conspiracy theories and ‘othering’. Various explanations of the effectiveness of these tools are explored. The toolkit approach to polarization is contrasted with one that sees ‘moral empathy gaps’ as the key to polarization and recommends greater empathetic understanding as the antidote. Questions are raised about this antidote and the Moral Foundations Theory that underpins it. The latter is criticized for overgeneralizing from the American experience. It is suggested that depolarization requires the use of a ‘depolarization toolkit’. Some of the techniques of depolarization are analogous to those of polarization. Others are very different. The reason that it is easier to polarize than to depolarize is that polarizers have the best tools at their disposal.
