This place is a good example of people disagreeing but ultimately compromising. There are arguments here that can get quite bitter, but they usually resolve with some form of agreement that a compromise would be the only way to resolve the issue about which we are arguing.
Perhaps naively, I think - or maybe it's more hope - a majority of the powerful and influential people in the country behave in the same fashion.
What's causing the current polarization I think started way, way before 2016. Kurt Anderson nails is quite well in
Evil Geniuses (god is that a great fucking book). It's been a long time coming, and Trump was the creation of the myriad causes, rather than its creator. But we can disagree on that.
Fuck, we could disagree on a whole ton of shit. But being thoughtful and circumspect, we'd ultimately compromise where it was required to allow society, govt, both, to function.
What scares me is what I think partly makes RT, and me, and most of us here, fond of the place. Yes, if you were here pre-9/11, there was a moment of bonding in that horror. RT describes it well, and reading her description took me right back to that very day, and the posts made on it, and where I was sitting, and the surreal aspect of what I was trying to grasp as the enormity of the thing came into focus.
But also, though RT doesn't say it, it's implicit: The people here are uniquely smart. It's hard to have an affinity for the dumb, and to come back to your point about polarization, it's the dumb who are causing all the problems. The dumb won't compromise. And there's a whole lot more of them in the country, in various areas, in various schools of thought, than there are the smart.
I may not agree with everyone here all the time, but I know what I'm not going to get when I come here: Dumb. The place is a refuge in that regard. And one can't help but having an affection for that in this day and age.
