This episode of Radio Active Magazine starts with an interview with Emily Wales with Planned Parenthood about the Missouri abortion amendment and ends with a brief comment about the increase in political polarization in recent decades.



2024 Missouri abortion amendment



Emily Wales, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains (PPGP), discusses 2024 Missouri Constitutional Amendment 3, which would legalize abortion in Missouri before fetal viability.



Ms. Wales is an attorney with previous experience as an assistant attorney general for the state of Missouri and a fellow with the Georgetown Women’s Law and Public Policy Program at the National Women’s Law Center.  Planned Parenthood was a key member of the coalition that helped secure abortion rights in the 2022 Kansas elections. PPGP has improved their three health centers in Kansas to expand reproductive health care services for people coming from out of state, including Missourians. Planned Parenthood advocates for better support for women. Their Great Plains region covers  Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma.



Evolution of political polarization in the US Congress



The last few minutes of this broadcast give a brief summary of data quantifying the evolution of political polarization in the US Congress, focusing primarily on the period since 1969. This is based largely on a data base originally created by political science professors Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal between 1989 and 1992, when they were both at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This data set includes all the roll call votes in the US Congress since the first Congress in 1789, when George Washington was President.



Since 1969, the Republican party has become substantially more Conservative, at least according to these Poole and Rosenthal data, while the Democrats have become a bit more Liberal. This is consistent with the increase in political polarization and violence in recent decades. Some of this increased violence has come from the Left, like the two attempts to assassinate former President Trump. However, most of the increase seems to have come from the Right, discussed in the interviews on Radio Active Magazine with Heidi Beirich, a co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Global Project Against Hate & Extremism (GPAHE), on August 27 and with Jacob Ware with the Council on Foreign Relations and Georgetown University on October 1.



One example is the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Another is the person killed and the 35 injured as a white-supremacist at a "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 drove his car into a crowd.



One early contributor to these changes seems to have been Nixon's "Southern Strategy" to convert segregationist Dixiecrats into Republicans. Another apparent contributor was major corporations buying all the major commercial broadcasters in the US, firing nearly all the investigative journalists and replacing them with the police blotter. The public thought that crime was out of control, when there had been no substantive increase in crime. The incarceration rate in the US increased by a factor of five, while income inequality began to increase as the ultra-wealthy took most of the benefits of productivity growth. The demise of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and the introduction of social media around 2004 also seems to have contributed to these changes. The Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen, who was featured on Radio Active Magazine August 20, said, "the shortest path to a click is anger or hate."



For more, see the Wikiversity article on, "Evolution of political polarization in the US Congress".