Our Culture of Contempt

> None of my conservative friends believe that nonsense about Obama, and none of my democrat friends believe that Trump is a Russian spy.

> The difference is that some of my conservative friends think it’s ok to have a swindly buffoon as president, and none of my democrat friends agree with that.

This suggests that in your mind, the "sides" you are seeing here are "conservative" vs. "democrat", which I find very interesting. One gets a party label, the other does not.

Secondly, to address your main point:

I don't understand why you feel that it's relevant what the "conservatives you know" believe. The political party that represents that demographic certainly strongly pushes those beliefs, does it not? Did the current President and party behind him not accuse the former one of being born in Kenya? Did they not and do they not still promote the belief that the issue of climate change is a "chinese conspiracy" (or alternatively, some ploy by the liberals and scientific establishment)? Did they prosecute a war on the "belief" that Iraq had WMDs (an action which cost your country several thousand soldiers' lives, and a few trillion dollars)?

Whatever your conservative friends may believe (let's leave aside the fact that you are making an argument via anecdote - your friends may or may not be representative of the demographic as a whole).. the party that represents them certainly pushes these understandings, and pushes them relentlessly, and justifies policy on the basis of those understandings.

I find your response to be similar to the article in question: generalized, abstracted, "stepping above".

Unfortunately, in this circumstance.. the details matter.

Plus, you get the extra magic of this same schism happening in the West generally.

I'd say there's a lot more to this than US domestic politics.

This isn't an unusual state of affairs. Historically, western civilization has faced similar problems with, eg, Catholics vs Protestants (which was substantially worse than anything we have now). The US specifically isn't yet even as bad as it was in the Civil War. The C v. P issue deserves special consideration - religious freedom isn't a principle in the west because it is warm and fuzzy. There were a lot of deaths.

The threat is always that one side gets so delusional they do away with the institutions and systems that moderate the disagreement. Things like equal voting and standing before the law, judicial precedent, free speech, personal freedom, etc, etc. That risk is not concentrated in either wing of politics.

> "but the article completely fails to examine the causes of said polarization"

Actually the article does exactly that:

> The sources of motive attribution asymmetry are easy to identify: divisive politicians, screaming heads on television, hateful columnists, angry campus activists and seemingly everything on the contempt machines of social media. This “outrage industrial complex” works by catering to just one ideological side, creating a species of addiction by feeding our desire to believe that we are completely right and that the other side is made up of knaves and fools. It strokes our own biases while affirming our worst assumptions about those who disagree with us.

I would add to the above the tech-fueled echo chambers, fake news, and clickbait journalism. As far as actual substantive differences between the 2 political parties, I don't think anything has changed dramatically in the past century.

Feel free to be as ideological and radical as you want. I believe in Medicare for all and UBI. But there is such a thing as healthy disagreements and healthy debates, and never does that include contempt. If you think that anyone who voted for the other party is worthy of contempt, you're part of the problem.