Worth the read, especially if you think about some of the posts (and posters) here.
Here are a few excerpts:
""We're living in a really different era," he said. "The partisanship is deeper. It's a cynical, suspicious society. The conspiracy theories that were once fringe elements have been allowed to filter into the mainstream."
and this:
"Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said it's not just polarization, but "tribalism."
"That means anyone who is not part of your tribe is the enemy," Ornstein said. "And anything you do to take on your own tribe becomes heresy. And I think that's different from what we had before."
Political scientists call it "negative partisanship" because Americans are now often driven more by wanting to punish the other side than wanting to advance their own cause."
and this, particularly terrifying:
"As the political landscape cleaved in the past 40 years, so did the way voters get information about politics and the trust they put in it.
The vast majority of Americans — 69 percent — said in 1974 that they trusted the media to report the news "fully, accurately and fairly," according to Gallup. That number has plummeted to just 41 percent today.
The collapse is driven largely by Republicans. Today, just 15 percent of Republicans say they generally trust the mainstream media, compared with 69 percent of Democrats.
There's only one news outlet that a majority of Republicans told Gallup they trust today: Fox News."
This last part is terrifying because Fox news is not really news and, in fact, any "news" has all but been pushed out in favor of opinion people like Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham, all of who have had notable instances of pushing complete nonsense.
The COCOON lives . .. America dies.
