Leaving aside the extraordinary level of gerrymandering that's been happening to boost Republican odds, I'm afraid the split in Congress really does reflect the political and cultural divisions and extreme partisanship of America as a whole. Where we once had a single more or less homogenous mass culture nationwide, now people can pick and choose their sources of news, culture and "truth" - like Fox vs. MSNBC. Purveyors of messages and misinformation, like Karl Rove and the Koch brothers, have exploited that to their advantage. So now we've got the blue coasts and big cities, and the red heartlanders.

The current makeup of the House mostly represents the extreme views in our society.

Partisan primaries eliminate the voices and choices of independent voters. In safe districts (the vast majority of congressional districts), the results of the primary (decided by the most partisan party members) also decide the general election. In most districts, the person elected holds extreme views that do not reflect the general consensus of the voters in the district. Plurality voting in single member districts produces a result that often ignores the will of 30% to 50% of the voters.

Simply changing to an open primary does not solve the problem and carries many pitfalls when combined with a plurality voting process. However, adopting an open primary with an approval voting process would better reflect the views of the voters. Candidates would have to appeal to all voters (regardless of party affiliation). The approval voting process would permit the selection of the two candidates that obtained the widest approval among voters to compete in the general election.

Using the above process in addition to creating multimember districts would result in even a more representative House, ensuring that the 30% to 50% of votes that are now ignored by the plurality voting process would no longer be ignored.

Polarization is certainly not new to America's political scene, but it seems to be approaching one of those points of inflection from a dynamic tension to a counterproductive one. It's important to address the mechanisms that accelerate polarization, at least the ones you can do something about.

One such mechanism is districting. The more that districts are drawn to favor majorities in one party or the other, the less the representatives of that district are accountable to all the residents. This creates political "hot houses" where more polarized candidates flourish vs more moderate ones, even though they may not be as representative, generally. Fully agree with prior comment. Couldn't a new system of redistricting be developed, perhaps using technology?

Another mechanism is campaign finance. High stakes funding turns politics into a full blown business enterprise, where special interests are the customers, and voters are the inputs to gaining power. The politicians - operating in a duopoly - have reached a kind of nasty equilibrium. That equilibrium benefits both parties, in that they sell the idea of how horrible the other party is to garner votes; this is most effective if the political balance is delicate. Either way it goes, this enables both parties to attract financial contributions. Here, campaign finance reform seems in order, maybe starting with Citizens United.

In any case, this seems the right place to take this on. Thank you.

While cultural and class divisions are widening (see Split: Class and Cultural Divides in American Politics by Mark D. Brewer, University of Maine and
Jeffrey M. Stonecash, Syracuse University, CQ Press), the differences don't have to result in broken politics. That phenomena is a result political parties that have used state legislatures to gerrymander as many "safe" districts as possible, thereby exaggerating the influence of the most extreme elements in society while "crowding out" the ability for moderate voices or at least people willing to compromise to have an influence. As a result, extremists use the primary process to vote out our pull to extreme positions, those candidates that dare to work with the other party to craft compromise legislation.
By sending to office only those who promise to "toe the line" the art of compromise - critical to the legislative process, is impossible.

We also must not underestimate the influence of social media to saturate people who share extreme views on politics, religion, and social mores with vitriol about their opponents and propaganda that reinforces their myopic worldviews. Civic education and respect for the legitimate views of others must be a priority in education, a rule of network media (enforcable by the FCC) and a requirement for particpation in our politics. This need not hamper free-speech. But we must expand the rules of what constitutes hate-speech to include code-words and images routinely abused by our messagers.