> Has it always been this way? Have Americans always allowed voting habits to dictate their choice of friends? Not to the degree we see today. I think it's som

> Has it always been this way? Have Americans always allowed voting habits to dictate their choice of friends? Not to the degree we see today. I think it's something that's really taken off in the last 8 to 10 years, and I remember seeing the first signs of it starting in maybe 2008. The Tea Party and Occupy Wallstreet movements seemed to be the leading indicators of a much more deepening divide. It's not really surprising to me though. I think when you frame it as "allowing voting habits to dictate your choice of friends" it sounds superficial, but there are deep ethical and ideological divides. You're framing like people are saying "You voted for X and so we can't be friends", but I think a more accurate framing would be "X is an abhorrent belief and cannot in good conscience have a relationship with anyone who would support X or any politician who is in favor of X". Believe it or not, this is _very different_ than it was maybe 20 years ago. I used to have good friends who were in the "other" party, and while we had pretty strong disagreements about policy, I never doubted that in the end we all wanted what was best for people, and our views of what the best outcomes would be were pretty aligned even if our ideas of how to get there were very different. Today, that's not the case. There's almost no common ground to find.