[scrollaway]

> What do you guys think?

I think this is nothing new. US mentality has been going very sharply that way for years; two sides of a coin becoming more and more extreme and caring more about hating the other side than about what's good for the country.

People bending over and accepting absurd things from their presidents, or politicians in general, just because they're "on my team".

Roll back a few years. How is it okay that the US ever allowed attack ads between politicians? Presidential election campaigns spanning over a year? "Reelection" campaigns starting a year or two into office?

How is it okay that your politicians can sweep atrocious bills under the rug by giving them fancy names like PATRIOT? In fact, how is patriotism so often used as an excuse - why is it even working?

The US turned politics into a team game. Us vs. them. American politicians have been using the "you're either with us or against us" rhetoric for decades; it then only makes sense that opposition becomes "the enemy".

So yes, I completely agree, it's shameful that people on both sides feel superior to the other. It's shameful that people are unable to recognize they flaw because, god forbid, should they start to think that "their team" has flaws then they'll end up in the other team, and the other team is even worse, yknow?

I could write more about this but I feel like it'll fall either on deaf ears, or on ears that already know this. The election has been a constant feeling of helplessness against a wave of knee-jerk reactions from a majority of people unwilling to hear the other side out. And this happens on both sides. How do you even begin to fix this, when the attitude is "yeah, but the other guys are doing it too"?

[naravara]

>two sides of a coin becoming more and more extreme and caring more about hating the other side than about what's good for the country.

Not really. [url=https://img-washingtonpost-com.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w1000/s... polarization in the US is driven entirely by the GOP. Full stop.[/url]

You can't address the problem if you're blinding yourself to its causes. The Democrats have, by and large, branded themselves as the party of non-partisan centrist technocrats, not as liberal firebrands. Sanders' defeat in the primaries only cemented this.

[CM30]

Don't think this is a US specific problem unfortunately.

Attack ads? Seem to be growing in popularity over here in the UK. Atrocious bills are being swept under the rug here too. And if the Brexit situation taught us anything, it's that the political scene here is very much an 'us vs them' situation too.

Either way, I suspect these trends are (sadly) becoming more and more normalised across almost all societies and countries now. The US might seem more extreme here, but the general pattern does seem to be getting more common elsewhere too.

[scrollaway]

Yeah, the UK is slowly copying the US model, lagging a few years behind it. But I don't think it's ever been as pronounced. The divide in the UK is far thinner than it's ever been in the US, even though it's still "us vs them".

It's also possible that the internet itself is helping to spread the US mentality to other countries. Scary to think about.