4 ms·

Regarding just recent history, 2015-2021 is more divisive the 2000-2015, don't you think?

• sangnoir 5y ago
  No - I think there's a class of people who weren't exposed to the divisions who're only now aware of it. In roughly chronological order: Anti-"war on terror" demonstrations, The Dixie Chicks being canceled, freedom fries, the handling of Katrina, the divisive 2008 presidential campaign season, the backlash to Obama's presidency, the rise of the Tea Party, the Benghazi investigation, Sandy Hook, birtherism. I probably missed a bunch of other partisan clashes. edit: I don't know how I forgot Bush v. Gore. That was way up there in terms of divisiveness.
  • krapp 5y ago
    It's almost as if something outside the norm happened relatively recently which for some reason dialed the divisions in American society and politics up to 11 then broke the knob off. Of course, to mention specifics would be partisan, and partisanship is culture war, and culture war is killing us so who can even say what? We'll just say that somewhere around the end of Obama's term it seems like maybe something happened.
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Regarding just recent history, 2015-2021 is more divisive the 2000-2015, don't you think? Maybe, but not as a sudden phase transition, just sort of a continuous process since the end of the New-Deal-to-~1994 overlapping partisan realignments and thr subsequent crystallization of the current ideological divide between the two major parties, returning to the steady state norm. The periods of reduced—or not-party-aligned—divisiveness during the realignment period were an aberration and artifact of the unsettled alignment.