What's going on sure sounds familiar.
The fault is ours, says Abe watching from "the other side."
If you could first know where you are and whither you are tending, you could better judge what to do and how to do it. You initiated a policy to tolerate the Marxist-Alinsky radicals and let them rant; not only has it not ceased but was constantly augmented by decades of infiltration and indoctrination. You now have two Americas. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half statist and half free; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.
The question today is either the opponents of statism will arrest the further spread of it and place it on course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become permanent.
Have you no tendency to the latter condition?
Let anyone who doubts carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination — piece of machinery, so to speak — compounded of the Republican Party hands-across-the-aisle doctrine and the dreadful actions among statism's chief architects.
". . . some key [events] exacerbated the national debate, fraying trust, and national cohesion just a little more each time . . . The two-party system that had governed America . . . began to fall apart . . . interest in politics took the place of all other forms of news-related entertainment . . . politicians were the celebrities . . . [Politics/ideology] was becoming such a habit, the reactions so automatic, that [journalists] taking sides on every news story became inevitable."
.. I just can't avoid thinking about this from for Love & Liberty by Robin Young and it's about 1857 America.
One-hundred-and-fifty years later the discord is