Understanding the government’s role in achieving the nation’s fundamental political values provides a roadmap for appreciating why time after time, the country has expanded government sometimes in bunches and sometimes in smaller batches. Government has been necessary to create, sustain, and expand markets, to protect people from economic loss and physical injury, and to maintain a social safety net for people mired in poverty due to age, health, or market conditions, not of their doing. History establishes that the defenders of government have a good story to tell. But they must tell it. The future of the country depends on appreciating what the government does and why it does it because the government remains essential to achieving our nation and its values.

Chapter 8, “Spoiling for A Fight: Armed Opposition,” begins a two-part examination of violent resistance and how, when, and why Poles embraced or rejected it. This discussion is deliberately postponed in the story, as much of the existing literature focuses on military resistance as a shorthand for resistance as a whole, which it was not. Polish military resistance efforts, initially launched by officers and soldiers of the Polish Army in hiding under occupation, remained fractured and hamstrung by vicious Nazi reprisals until 1942. Despite its danger, myriad groups organized around plans for insurrection, spanning the political spectrum from orthodox communists to the fascist far right, and including Polish-Jewish participation. After the destruction of many such initiatives and the merging and reformation of others, one increasingly grew in size and strength: the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) eventually dominated a chaotic resistance landscape through the support of the Western Allies. This chapter argues that violent resistance was initially a disorganized catastrophe, and only late in the occupation did a few surviving underground militaries achieve the ability to influence the Polish population or threaten the German occupiers.

Chapter 9, “Home Army on the Offensive: Violence in 1943-1944,” dissects mature intelligentsia military resistance. As the tide of war turned and the Germans endured their first battlefield defeats against the Soviet Union, the consolidated Home Army grew aggressive. Its most effective move was a 1943 assassination campaign targeting Wehrmacht officers, Nazi police, and German administration personnel called Operation Heads. Heads intimidated the Germans and shifted occupation policy. The Home Army’s perceived success and the advance of the Eastern Front toward Warsaw in 1944 convinced underground military leaders that they were facing their last opportunity to launch a city-wide insurrection. Their rebellion, now known as the Warsaw Uprising, failed. Remaining German personnel in the city were reinforced and crushed the insurrection, slaughtered civilians, and destroyed the city. This chapter argues that military conspiracy, like Catholic resistance, had its successes but was ultimately dependent on the international situation and could not secure the practical support of the Grand Alliance in the face of both German and Soviet opposition.

Although political misinformation is not a new phenomenon, the topic has received renewed attention in recent years, in conjunction with sweeping changes in the contemporary media environment. As the Internet and, particularly, social media become an increasingly common source for political information, citizens receive more and more of their news in an uncontrolled and minimally regulated setting where misinformation may easily spread. However, even if the sources of misinformation have fundamentally changed, best practices for correcting misinformation have not. While many of the pieces cited in this chapter do not focus explicitly on the Internet or social media, these works can still inform scholarly understanding of how to correct misinformation on these platforms. The cognitive processes we highlight are likely to translate to the digital realm and are thus crucial to understand when developing prescriptions for social media-based misinformation. Nevertheless, we also spotlight a number of recent studies that examine methods for correcting misinformation in the context of social media.

The aim of this chapter is to offer an exhaustive review of the literature exploring the link between social media and political polarization. It highlights the areas where a consensus based on empirical evidence has already emerged but also identifies the questions that remain open and the type of data and analysis that would help address them.