[rayiner]

Outside fringe elements, Americans don’t disagree about reality so much as they have extreme differences in values that cause them to see facts very differently. Follow Breitbart or Mother Jones for a while. A news report might be about someone released without bail and murdering someone, or someone dying because they couldn’t get insulin medication. Both things actually happened: the article contains a police report, or photos, or whatever. Some people are going to get outraged by one or the other thing, but for the other thing will be like “well let’s put that in context, how often does that happen?”

American style polarization is common in most countries, from Latin America to Asia. As a Bangladeshi, where a country that’s 95% ethnically, linguistically, and religiously homogenous but still manages to have violent disagreements about politics, American polarization seems tame to me by comparison.