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Listen: we are not witnessing a rise in polarization. We are witnessing the very end of the post-war era, where a social welfare state was built in Western nations who had just experienced two generations of 40 million dead.
Liberalism caused political tensions at home by exporting war to other (non-western) countries and dealt with the left and right differently. On the right - they were either absorbed into large tent parties, or left to their small religious orgs or social clubs.
On the left was the Red Scare where leftwing movements have been infiltrated, demonized, harassed and crushed by the Liberal state. Social democracy became "the left" because it didn't pose a threat to Liberalism.
Liberalism's natural end, neoliberalism, has shed all of the reasons (and memory) of why the welfare state existed in the first place -- to care for one another and to reduce suffering. Instead, it's aggressively expanded the second part of the Welfare State -- capitalist growth.
I don't know who out there needs to hear this today but listen: we're watching the death of one order and the birth of another. And there will be very few writers who will be able to succinctly explain this. The majority will be reaching around in the dark.
