The Blankenhorn connection: thought and polarization

At The American Interest: The Top 14 Causes of Political Polarization by David Blankenhorn. Blankenhorn offers "a bakers-dozen worth of causes" and then says

None of these 13 causes directly perpetuate polarization. They are likely what analysts would call distal (ultimate) causes, but they are not proximate (immediate, direct) causes. They seem to have shaped an environment that incentivizes polarization, but they are not themselves the human words and deeds that polarize.

And so our bakers-dozen list ultimately doesn’t satisfy. We need a 14^th cause, arguably the most important one. It’s certainly the most direct and immediate, the most proximate, cause of polarization.

14. The growing influence of certain ways of thinking about each other. 

Certain ways of thinking, he says. He's got a good list. Here's how it starts:

• Favoring binary (either/or) thinking.
• Absolutizing one’s preferred values.
• Viewing uncertainty as a mark of weakness...
  

Certain problematic ways of thinking. Two paragraphs later, reinforcing the changes in our thinking as the cause of polarization, Blankenhorn writes:

At this point in the process, unless some cataclysmic social change (economic collapse, another world war) does it for us, the first thing to change to get out of this mess is our minds.

To summarize the article, Blankenhorn is saying that polarization arises from flawed thinking. From illogical logic. From having one's conclusions in the cart that's before the horse of argument.

I agree of course; that's why I'm quoting Blankenhorn. But I take it one step further back in the causal chain: "Wrong-headed thinking arises as the economy decays". To improve our thinking, we must first improve our economy.

The economy goes bad; our thinking follows; and then political polarization opens the door to a faster, broader decline, not just in the economy but also in government and society: This is the sort of thing historians look back on 2000 years later, trying to understand what caused the fall of that civilization. 

I want no part in this decline, except prevention.