It makes you wonder if the sound bite cycle and instant feedback loop with the general public encourages this behavior, even more so than politicians just being

It makes you wonder if the sound bite cycle and instant feedback loop with the general public encourages this behavior, even more so than politicians just being more dumb. You'd think that with the educational institutions most of these people come from, they would be capable of significantly more thoughtful and in depth discussions than we see from them. I mean, Ted Cruz in college, by all accounts was a stand out on the debate team at university. I'm no fan of his, but certainly he's proven capable of the type of discussion we (at least, I) would like to see from these people. But if you engage in a classical debate and the masses get bored a la Idiocracy, or you can't engage your opponent because they are just lobbing verbal grenades and non sequiturs, there's nothing you can do. You'll either be the boring person no one listens to, the angry person that seems to be talking down to everyone else, or you just engage at the lowest comment denominator and throw out your own grenades. Add to that social media blowing up when you say some rhetorical BS (good or bad), which then gets the news channels to talk about the social media, which then feeds back into the social media, you can see why there's no incentive to rise above it all. Being the 'better' person in this case means you get ignored, which means they aren't going to vote for you.