Good points, though I have some other thoughts (note that this is coming from an American; I don’t know the situation in other democratic countries): 1. More

Good points, though I have some other thoughts (note that this is coming from an American; I don’t know the situation in other democratic countries): 1. More people have access to a university education today than in previous generations. Granted, not everybody goes to college, and I’m concerned about the relatively low standards of today’s high schools outside of highly-ranked ones that serve as feeders to elite universities. 2. I wholeheartedly agree. Moreover, I feel modern American culture as a whole, and not just politics, is very short-term driven compared to previous generations, though this is a perception and I have no data to back this up. I feel so many businesses, for example, are hyper-focused on achieving the next quarter’s targets. To put it in computer science terms, sometimes a greedy approach isn’t optimal. 3. I sympathize, but this is not the first time America has dealt with a reckless media landscape. I remember reading in high school about “yellow journalism” and its role in instigating the Spanish-American War. 4. I wonder if modern presidential primary elections helped contribute to polarization as opposed to the old, pre-George McGovern methods of choosing presidential nominees? The Democratic and Republican parties used to be less uniform ideologically, and party bosses often picked compromise candidates to try to appeal to different factions of each party. The pre-Civil Rights Democratic Party was an alliance of Northern pro-union, moderate-to-liberal politicians and Southern conservatives. The Republican Party had Northeastern moderates (like Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.) and conservatives from other parts of the country (like Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater). On one hand primaries are arguably more democratic, but on the other hand they’ve fueled polarization. 5. I’ll have to think about this some more.