… High tension, raw emotion and occasional violence have always been a feature of American democracy — in times of war and peace, through presidential impeachments and mass protest movements. But interviews with voters across the country, along with an analysis of recent research by political scientists who specialize in partisan division, suggest that politics is changing how Americans think and behave in new and unsettling ways.
Experts point to several reasons. The volume and sheer ubiquity of information about politics, combined with Americans’ ability to instantaneously render public judgment on one another’s views, has made the political conversation much noisier. And for the first time the country is led by someone who inflames that conversation on a nearly daily basis, taunting his adversaries on Twitter and quickly triggering tens of thousands of responses. CONT.
Jeremy W. Peters, New York Times