While polarization is bad now, it's nowhere close to historical extremes, and it's not even as bad as it was during the post-Vietnam era only a few decades ago.

As for fear of doxing: plenty of people openly supported and voted for George Wallace (a noted white Supremacist) back in the day, and even Roy Moore (accused pedophile) just 2 years ago. Proud Boys members openly pose for the cameras even as they espouse racist views, and QAnon members brag about being part of QAnon.

The purported shy Trump voter? Doesn't exist. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-supporters-arent-...

As a data point, I live in a conservative-leaning area of a purple/blue state. Along my normal driving routes I had seen quite a few, but over the past few weeks they have mostly been taken down (in every case, other republican candidate signs still stand). Scenario one, Trump supporters supported him all the way up until now, enough to donate to his re-election campaign to buy a yard sign, and in the final weeks of the election, decided that they'd had enough and taken down their signs. Scenario two, some random stranger decided that it's their right, nay, their responsibility, to moderate someone else's yard signs.

Not every Trump voter is a "Proud Boy" or noted white supremacist, maybe even some of your friends are who "just aren't interested in politics" because they know that if they were honest with you, you would flip out. Some understand that this attitude about yard signs is actually representative of an entire worldview, and opposing that might actually be the lesser of two evils.

Similar to how "not every Trump Voter is a >>Proud Boy<<" not every Biden supporter is a yard-sign stealing communist. Actually the extremists are in the minority in both groups. If you start going down that road and base your vote on how bad the worst people on the other side are, democracy is pretty much collapsing already.

Sure - I am above my quota for politics posts on HN but since this article is about problematic tail behavior I'll go ahead anyways. You are right that probably a very small minority of Trump opposers are actually stealing yard signs. However, a larger component are advocating for censorship of opinions and facts that disagree with their worldview, and many more will readily shut down any opposing discussion about immigration policy or international trade, supporting police, or even simply wearing a red hat, with strong and viral accusations of "racism" - signalling to their allies that this person should be punished, and many of those allies are happy to comply in whatever way their position in society allows them to. These attitudes and behaviors are pervasive and malignant; the yard signs are only a visible symptom of a larger problem.

I just remembered this thread when I came across this story of a club owner being harassed after appearing in an Ad for Joe Biden https://www.billboard.com/amp/articles/news/politics/9471700....

Essentially I think that those narratives about one side "shutting down" the other side are not true for either party. In my opinion they are mainly the result of filter bubbles where you are constantly presented to all the outrageous things that the other side is doing (the above mentioned article is clearly an example) while actually people remain largely civil and are not tied to their political identity in such an extreme way.