When I was in grade school in the 1970s, we learned about the Civil Rights Movement, not as something in the distant past, but as something that had really taken hold with Brown v. Board of Education and had culminated in the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King around 10 years earlier. Despite the fact that at that time we were only one generation removed from de jure segregation in the Jim Crow South, things were looking up as racial bigotry, while still alive and well, had begun to fall into disrepute and the idea of America as truly being one nation was beginning to take hold. Race relations weren't great but there was a general optimism that they were beginning to move in the right direction. Yes, we had Archie Bunker on television, but we also had The Jeffersons. Women were also making progress both socially and professionally in a movement that had largely begun to free them via the pill and reproductive autonomy. Also, America was beginning to experience a nascent gay rights movement.
In the 80s, Americans of all stripes participated in politics via the vote and Democrats and Republicans, while not agreeing with each other, tended to believe that their political opponents genuinely had America's best interests at heart. Disagreement stemmed mainly from debating which party had the better ideas to accomplish their shared ends. For example, liberals wanted to address poverty through the creation of social programs which would be paid for by taxing the rich whereas conservatives argued that lower taxes would encourage job creation which was desperately needed in order to combat the chronically high unemployment numbers and argued that jobs were more effective at combating poverty than handouts. My point in bringing this up is not to debate which party was right, it is simply to point out that both sides were able to disagree without demonizing the other side as incorrigibly evil or presuming that their differences were based on malicious intent.
Further proof that Americans were able to tolerate and even engage with their political opponents back then comes from the fact that in 1983 Ronald Reagan won his second term by a landslide helped by the existence of many people who self-identified as Reagan Democrats. These were people who, while retaining their Democratic allegience, were able to say I like how the economy is doing under this President and I feel confident with him as commander in chief. I am therefore willing to vote for the other side. Similarly, while Bill Clinton won his first term largely due to the fact that third party candidate Ross Perot siphoned off support from George H. Walker Bush, he won his 2nd term by taking 49.2% of the popular vote versus 40.7% for Bob Dole. These results are a far cry from the razor-thin margins that exemplified the results of both the Bush/Gore and later the Clinton/Trump and later Trump/Biden results which basically were decided along party lines.
Political discourse generally continued in this vane all the way into the late 90s when the internet really began to take hold and I (now in my late 20s) joined an online personality group list where, among other things we debated ideas in religion, politics, social issues, and the like. The group's rules were generally permissive except in regard to civility. We were not allowed to verbally attack our opponents with ad hominem attacks. Attacking our opponents' ideas was of course expected. List members would point out when someone made an argument using logical fallacies such as appeal to authority, red herring arguments, non sequiturs, and poisoning the well. We vigorously debated while never hating. The list was regarded as a dojo of political ideas. Around that time, I started a political blog and strove to maintain those ideals of open political discussion while avoiding personal attacks.
Somewhere along the line America became more divided and people began to truly believe that their political opponents were either incredibly stupid or guided by venal motivations. Post 9/11, when the left began to criticize the war in Iraq the right said it was because they hated America. When America found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the left skipped straight to "Bush lied people died", ignoring the more likely possibilities which were 1) rather than lying, Bush genuinely believed the information he received from the intelligence community which turned out to be wrong, or; 2) the illegal weapons programs did in fact exist but that all evidence thereof was successfully removed/destroyed by Sadaam's operatives. Neither party could consider that their opponents might be inept or mistaken, the presumption went directly to evil.
If an outsider were to listen to the criticisms both parties regarding their opponents, they would have concluded that American politics was choosing between the America haters on the one side and the soulless supporters of war for the sake of oil and the enrichment of the military industrial complex on the other. The left was never able to consider that their opponents might genuinely be motivated by their belief that toppling Sadaam and creating a more stable Iraq would be in the best interests of the US and of the world, and the right was never able to consider that the left might oppose the war because it was ill-conceived, horribly expensive both in money and lives, and was unwinnable.
Predictably, as America has regressed into two separate camps which are equally hateful and intolerant of each other, there no longer seems to be any role for political discourse between the parties. One cannot be seen to compromise and politically horse trade with evil incarnate and as such the days of rapprochement between the two sides and working together across party lines appear to be over. Whereas President Lincoln once warned that a house divided against itself cannot stand, America is now a virtual duplex where both parties don't interact with each other, much less get along. Americans don't even watch the same news and the result is we seem to be living in two competing realities. It is for that reason that I don't enjoy writing political essays anymore because what is the point of writing a persuasive argument when neither side is willing to be persuaded?
