During my several decades I would say polarization and tribalism has been a mainstay of American discourse. Think of “communist” as an all-purpose slur in the 5

During my several decades I would say polarization and tribalism has been a mainstay of American discourse. Think of “communist” as an all-purpose slur in the 50s, the Vietnam and establishment vs. counterculture situation in the 60s/70s, some weak anti-Yuppie stuff in the 80s, etc. But I can’t think of any time this bad. I personally blame not only the algorithms, but the focus of political parties on activating their more extreme constituents rather than on achieving reasonable compromise and effectively governing. It used to be you could have an actual substantive debate, but now at least one side will be either unable or unwilling to participate. The Republicans in particular got so good at energizing the extreme “base” as an electoral strategy that it seems the whole party leadership was inadvertently replaced by the “base”, which makes it very hard to make progress.