> because of course they're not going to be, and never have been in the history of history.

I wouldn't say that in the past they have been as polarized. In fact you can actually measure this by looking at node connections.[0] But we need to hold politicians accountable. That's the mechanism to keep them in check but we're also failing at that.

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

Yes, we're living in a particularly polarizing time. I'd suggest that's probably not random, and it's probably not due to typical human behavior of politicans. Were politicians of the past paragons of virtue? In large part of course not.

So what is different now?

My pet theories for suspects are: social media algorithmically enhancing negative emotions and behaviors, a relative lack of enforcement of white-collar crime (especially amongst the rich), large media conglomorates (not a new phenomenon really, but the current ones are a bit different than past) and wealth inequality.

> Were politicians of the past paragons of virtue? In large part of course not.

No one is claiming they were. This isn't a binary thing, it is a spectrum. So what's different now? Where they lie on that spectrum.

> My pet theories for suspects are:

You and pretty much everyone else. This is extremely common. But these are also pretty common things in history. Though again, spectrum. We're in one of the most unequal times in America. Rich rarely got persecuted, ever (hell, remember the Pinkertons?). Rumors and misinformation used to spread faster than horses could travel. So let's instead look at what similarities there are to historical examples.

Social media isn't common in history, so it's the easiest one to pick out as an outlier.