I think this is the issue; at least in the U.S. EVERYTHING is becoming more politicized no matter how inane.

You are also EXPECTED to have a binary opinion on all these issues with no room for differing opinions.

Look at the NFL protests during the anthem. Kneel and you are a bleeding heart liberal that hates the cops. Stand and you are a red hat conservative promoting police brutality and the Private Prison Complex.

Every day there's a new outrage that somehow splits up the community down party lines.

It's classic divide and conquer. The ultra rich have framed politics as red vs. blue, when in reality it has always been (and always will be): them vs. the rest of us.

i remember during the financial crisis thinking if only the tea party and the occupy crowd realized they were two sides to the same coin maybe something great could have happened. I feel like that dawned on the powers-that-be and the old divide and conquer technique was quickly applied; tea party turned far right, occupy turned far left and they've been fighting ever sense.

It's eerily similar to the Machiavellian approach to alliances. Something along the lines of joining forces only with those who are weaker than you but can be used to amass power against your greatest threats. In the context of the examples you provided: major party identifies small group making noise, major party aligns themselves with that group, major party exploits that group as tool against opposing major party, major party under no obligation to truly pursue agenda of absorbed group due to relative power.

They definitely had the same spirit and were pissed off about many of the same things, but they differed drastically on the solutions...

The Tea Party was funded by the Koch brothers.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/13/tea-party-bill...

I blame the media. They only ever cover the most extreme viewpoints. They wouldn't get clicks otherwise if an article was titled "Voter aren't sure what to make of the Supreme Court nominee".

I've overheard a few conversations of my coworkers (yes, anecdote) about the whole Kavanaugh debate and pretty much every one of them was pretty common sense (e.g. not sure if I believe her, but Kavanugh certainly sounds like he isn't an angel).

I would go one step further and say that I blame the medium.

TV and visual information mediums are very effective at promoting emotions, but make it very difficult to convey rational arguments and thoughts. Notice how easily you can be distracted by the appearance of the messenger and not pay attention to the message itself.

There is a very good book on this called "Amusing ourselves to death", by Neil Postman. He wrote this in 1985 and he was far ahead of his time.

You could take that a step further and blame media consumers then - the media promotes the stories that bring in ad revenue more than others.

Yes. Seems far more plausible that the media is a reflection of human nature than that the media has reshaped the way people think.

Media is not merely a reflection, but a perpetuator of extremes. If everyone stopped using media, there would still be extremist, but they would be so far distant we wouldn't think of them or their ideas.

Here's a great interactive explanation of how this works: https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb

Absolutely, only meant to point out that the media brings out the worst that is already in us rather than corrupting otherwise civil beings.

To speak even more generally, humans make tools that amplify our impact. Some of those tools make us better at being terrible, some make us better at being clever, some do both.

And Twitter is part of the media and has helped shape nearly all other forms of media. That brings us back to the subject of this post.

> Stand and you are a red hat conservative promoting police brutality and the Private Prison Complex.

Nobody is saying this

I am saying this. There's no reason for anyone to stand for the national anthem, these days. Women should be kneeling in protest, men should be kneeling in solidarity.

I think you may just have confirmed GP's point.

then just say no. stop falling for the partisan trap and assert your right to have an opinion disconnected from a political identity (even if that opinion more-or-less falls in line with one of those parties).

Who said that standing means you're a MAGA supporter? That sounds like a straw man to me.

It's interesting that you say this would be unthinkable a couple decades ago when it seems, on the face of it, that it's pretty similar to the Clarence Thomas confirmation process in 1991. Do you see them as distinctly different?

From what I've read, the time after the World Wars was an aberration and we are now returning to the norm.

This seems to be the case.

It takes a mass tragedy to unite people. Look at what happened to GWB's approval after 9/11!

I worry it will take another war or mass terror attack to get us out of this divide we are in.

If only I were Ozymandias planning a fake Alien attack on New York to bring everyone together...

It's been going bad for a few decades now :

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/23/a-stu...

> It doesn't matter which side of that issue you are on, but something is happening here that would be unthinkable a couple decades ago.

Robert Bork, the man Nixon promised a Supreme Court seat to for assisting with the Saturday Night Massacre, was fairly close to making it to the supreme court. He blamed "ultraliberals, radicals and leftists" and their dangerous tactics for his vote failing. Hardly unthinkable.

In most countries in the world either nowadays or in historical perspective it would be unimaginable that there would be a dialog between different cluster of powers. They'd just try to destroy each other no matter what.

I agree that politics has polarized in the last decade, but I would say the primary cause is the wave of populism in the aftermath of the financial crisis, which has overlapped with, and been amplified by, the social media explosion.

I am old enough to remember that the supreme court choose Bush as president -- that was an aweful moment (and would have been so if it was the other way around too). A conspiracy by one side to harm the other, that is politics.

As for civility, you can argue that but in my mind that civility ended with the candidacy of Trump. I hold the belief that civility is overrated though, I would much rather have them be honest than civil.

Hyperpartisanism is not new. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_machine