There's a bit more to it than that. Like...untold reams of social media filtering out key details, such as aggressions committed by the narrating political side; resulting in a manufactured sense of grievance before any confrontation even begins. Stemming from or coupled with obscene levels of hypocrisy where opposing sociopolitical groups are held collectively responsible for the actions of a minority whereas the misdeeds of allied sociopolitical groups are dismissed as the actions of a minority (aka a few bad apples).
Yep. And it results in craziness, and then someone dies. Hopefully it goes down from there, but sometimes things go up from those points. "Up" is a very bad direction if the current point is "one person dead."
I'll bring up something I first ran across a couple of months ago. I was listening to NPR and they had a guest on who was researching the current state of American political life, and the apparent divisions in America. What she found in her research was that there were people on the far right and there were people on the far left, and mostly there were a whole bunch of people in the middle.
That's pretty unsurprising, right? If everyone was on the far right or far left, they wouldn't be "far" anything. They would just be right and left. The interesting part of her research was how people perceived "the other side", these days. People on the center-left, when describing people on the right, would always describe people on the far right. The same was true of people on the right.
So, a mildly conservative person would say that there were leftist hordes trying to undermine the foundation of the country, and a mildly liberal person would say that the Republicans were out to subjugate women and minorities and create a dictatorship.
Everyone is sure that they and their friends are the only reasonable people in the room.
I don't know exactly what causes that problem, and I certainly don't know how to fix it. I know that it's reinforced by partisan media where for hours on end people are fed a diet of "the other side is crazy". Certainly Donald Trump bears some responsibility for also feeding that, but I don't think Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi can get off completely without blame here either. Congressional leaders don't have anywhere near the bully pulpit that the president does, but if they would go out of their way to act like adults instead of fanning the flames, it couldn't hurt.
