A Morse Bookmarks event featuring Neil O'Brian, assistant professor of political science at UO.

In the late twentieth century, gay rights, immigration, gun control, and abortion debates all burst onto the political scene, scrambling the parties and polarizing the electorate. Neil A. O’Brian traces the origins of today’s political divide on these issues to the 1960s when Democrats and Republicans split over civil rights. It was this partisan polarization over race, he argues, that subsequently shaped partisan fault lines on other culture war issues that persist to this day.

Neil O’Brian is an academic expert in U.S. politics with focus on public opinion, political parties and polarization. In May 2024, he was named a 2024 Andrew Carnegie Fellow.