Facebook might be a factor in the division we see today in America but don't kid yourself: we were pretty f*in' divided during the Bush years—the Supreme Court had to decide that election, and the 9/11 unity lasted about a day and a half—and the GOP stopped at nothing to go after Clinton.
This has been going on since the 1980s. Facebook may be an accelerant, but it didn't start this fire—not by a long shot.
> we were pretty f*in' divided during the Bush years, and the GOP stopped at nothing to go after Clinton.
Its quite weird, because the exact same narrative of unprecedented polarization has been used under Clinton (during the bipartisan neoliberal policy consensus), Bush, Obama, and Trump (with Biden, its at least usually acknowledged as a continuation of that under Trump, not new), with most major voices just seemingly forgetting the unbroken succession of preceding instances of the same narrative, pretending whatever is currently happening came recently, out of the blue without warning.
I think you can justify the claim that there was a real increase in political tribalism resulting from the resolution of the long post-WWII set of political realignments that was particularly evident from about the 1994 midterms and the Contract With America through today. (With some signs as far back as the 1980s as the lines of the new alignment started to become clear and the parties really accelerated movement toward their new polarity, where previously major ideological divides weren't aligned with the major partisan divide, so that ideological factions, to succeed, had to work across party lines.) But that's not as sexy a narrative as “suddenly we woke up in this election cycle with divisiveness that just came out of nowhere”.
I think it's pretty obvious to anyone familiar with US history that the seeds of these "culture wars" started in the '60s with the hippie movement. While I wasn't old enough, I know several older liberals who talked about Reagan the way many younger liberals talk about Trump (and probably worse!), and older conservatives who talked about Carter similarly to how younger conservatives talk about Obama. Reagan was known as the Teflon President because none of the gaffes he made could ever stick to him and he remained quite popular throughout his rule.
The problem is, the internet, the web, and now social media has accelerated this divisiveness to a whole new point. As the GP says, it's an accelerant. Like a small cooking fire can turn nasty with the addition of gas, the acceleration of the culture wars thanks to the winner-take-all outcomes of today mean that everything is getting more heated _faster_.
EDIT: While I know it's faux pas, I am curious where/why the downvotes are coming (from) simply because this seems fairly non-controversial, and also because it started out with a few upvotes first.
> The US can barely afford to school its children, purchase its homes, or enact reasonable public health measures without bankrupting people.
I think its pretty obvious to anyone whose knowledge of US history extends earlier than the 1960s that it did not start there (and, also, that the existence of the culture war and partisan polarization, while not unrelated, are quite distinct.)
> The problem is, the internet, the web, and now social media has accelerated this divisiveness to a whole new point
No, its not, as looking at US history anytime outside of a partisan realignment will show. Partisan polarization is a feature of the divide between the major parties in the two-party system aligning with the major ideological divides in the country, which they tend to do in a normal stable political alignment, but not during a period of partisan realignment.
The relatively low level of partisan divisiveness (despite the often quite high level of ideological divisiveness, seen in overlapping things like the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement, the youth counterculture/“hippie” movement, etc.) in the (roughly) WWII to 1990s period isn't due to some kind of weird temporary absence of technology needed for partisan division, it is due to the long and overlapping partisan realignments spurred by (mainly) the New Deal Coalition and parties settling out their positions on civil rights. These things meant that on the politically salient ideological issues, the divide between the parties was not aligned with the major cleavages; “liberal Republicans” were farther left on the key ideological issues of the day than “conservative Democrats”, and the opposing ideological factions were present in both parties.
That political realignments had largely settled out by the mid-1990s, with Clinton and the remaining “conservative” Democrats who hadn't defected to the Republicans solidly to the left of what was acceptable for Republicans, and vice versa, which enabled ideological division to translate more directly into partisan division.
> Partisan polarization is a feature of the divide between the major parties in the two-party system aligning with the major ideological divides in the country, which they tend to do in a normal stable political alignment, but not during a period of partisan realignment.
A feature? I'm not aware of any document written by the American founders that calls this a "feature" of the system. An emergent property of FPTP perhaps but not a feature. I'd call it a mistake to attribute more to FPTP than its intuitive appeal; the American founders invented FPTP off-the-cuff.
> The relatively low level of partisan divisiveness (despite the often quite high level of ideological divisiveness, seen in overlapping things like the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement, the youth counterculture/“hippie” movement, etc.) in the (roughly) WWII to 1990s period isn't due to some kind of weird temporary absence of technology needed for partisan division, it is due to the long and overlapping partisan realignments spurred by (mainly) the New Deal Coalition and parties settling out their positions on civil rights. These things meant that on the politically salient ideological issues, the divide between the parties was not aligned with the major cleavages; “liberal Republicans” were farther left on the key ideological issues of the day than “conservative Democrats”, and the opposing ideological factions were present in both parties.
Right but what _caused_ this political realignment? I mean sure, you can say that the ideologies were extant and during the Civil Rights Movement (and that this divide itself traces itself back to the Reconstruction period and before that into the founding of the US itself) the New Deal Coalition began unraveling and formed the seeds of today's divide, but I submit a large part of what exacerbated that divide was technology. FDR was a popular president and helped cement the New Deal coalition largely because of his use of radio. Likewise Goldwater and early televangelists received a lot of their support from the rise of TV. Social media is just the continuation of this ongoing technological trend.
Facebook is more than a factor. It is central to the problem as the largest social media corporation. Its amplification of psychopathic content to maximize the sickest forms of engagement for profit has people effectively living in a destructive cult. Remember when first came the tea party with their death panels talk, then birtherism, then Trump, QAnon and coup attempts?
They do not, however, predate opportunistic actors begging for shares of their content on the platform, and of the platform's users happily doing so. I know; my dad was one of them.
There's a difference of kind to mass broadcast on a platform one incidentally scrolls (and thus receives incidental exposure from) versus, say, chain emails. The latter have a lot lower impact and require way more activation energy to push onward than a one-click Share.
All that garbage was circulating and being amplified in early Facebook and for many years later, even today, generating engagement and profit regardless of algorithms. They just made it worse over time. Why do you also dismiss the rest of the list?
This has been going on since the 1980s. Facebook may be an accelerant, but it didn't start this fire—not by a long shot.