[jacobr1]

The weird thing though ... is how recent that polarization really is. Pre-polarized America (which is subjective and has been a long slide down a continuum) basically had something similar to parliamentary coalition-building politics where factions would shift within (and more rarely between) parties. There was a significant balancing act of the different "wings" of each party, and the regional differences were much more present.

[dragonwriter]

> The weird thing though ... is how recent that polarization really is

The weird thing is that people refer to the period of the overlapping post-WWII realignments, and the associated misalignment of the divide between the major parties with the major ideological divides, as being “pre-polarization”, since it was a time of intense political polarization, characterized by the period of the some of the most intense and violent sustained internal political conflict in the country after the Civil War (the overlapping Race/Civil Rights, Anti-War, and some overlapping less conflicts of the 50s-70s), where the polarizing issues just didn't cleanly align with the divide between the major parties.

Intense political polarization isn't new. What is new (or, rather, has returned to it's historical norm after an unusually long break) is the partisan divide actually aligning with the main salient ideological divides around which the polarization occurs, as the period of realignment settled out around the early-to-mid-1990s.

[ncmncm]

What is new is that, instead of the partisan divide aligning with the ideological divide, the ideological divide turned over and around to match where the arbitrary partisan divide happened to be.

So now we have "conservatives" identifying with Russians and against election regularity, and "liberals" identifying with the FBI and government mandates and against free speech and inquiry.

[dragonwriter]

> What is new is that, instead of the partisan divide aligning with the ideological divide, the ideological divide turned over and around to match where the arbitrary partisan divide happened to be.

No, the ideological divide had basically settled out by the 1980s, and the parties sorted out to match by the mid-1990s.