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Comment by astine | Hacker News Reader

There may have been more violence among various radical and extremist factions in American politics in the 70s but that doesn't mean that America was more divided politically over all. There wasn't nearly as much partisanship in the upper-echelons of power in 70s and I suspect that there was more consensus among people in more moderate circles. There also wasn't this huge epistemological divide running right through the middle of the country; people were generally working from a common understanding of reality. Not so, today.

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The political class may have been unified, but perhaps because so many people didn't participate in politics. Many religious people stayed away or at least did not vote along religious lines, and other large segments were disenfranchised altogether. So the separations may have existed but simply did not play out in the political arena because politics was in the hands of a homogeneous group.

Most people simply weren't exposed to a very wide spectrum of beliefs. Mass media focused on hard news, and it was either local and/or controlled by a few groups.

The wider diversity of media that came later allowed more opportunity for people to 1) find a viewpoint they more closely identify with, and 2) become outraged about viewpoints vastly different than their own.

and 3) other people to realize this and capitalize on it for money and/or political power.

>There also wasn't this huge epistemological divide running right through the middle of the country; people were generally working from a common understanding of reality. Not so, today.

Everyone was watching the same network news and reading the same newspaper. Once niche news sources started to become widely available, everyone went to the news source that gave them the news how they wanted to hear it. Over time these news sources grew more and more polarized as they continued to cater to their specific niche audience (some sources are certainly more brazen and intentional with this approach, but it happens naturally if you aren't actively working to stop it). There is only so much polarization that can happen when we all agree on the same basic set of facts. But now we are all stuck in our own bubbles, only listen to news that reinforces our world view, and we continue to spiral further and further into polarization.

With online news and the rapid news cycles, we're living in how The Onion presented 'Live poll lets pundits pander in real time': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFpK_r-jEXg

So true! In addition to your points, so many were even watching the same news program for one person - Walter Cronkite at CBS. Additionally, the newspapers were of high quality. Of course, there were editorials with opinion pieces, but the news articles generally were reported neutrally (or at least with overt bias).

>There also wasn't this huge epistemological divide running right through the middle of the country; people were generally working from a common understanding of reality.

This is mostly a myth. Conspiracy theories for example, often taken as an example today of how flimsy reality is, always had an immense impact on American politics. Many American presidents were committed believers of conspiracy theories, Nixon was openly paranoid, of course with an extremely political bent.

The absurdity of the cold war and its influence on division in politics and what is actually real or not is well documented in just about every film made in the era.

Insofar as American politics actually is more divided today I wouldn't even frame it as a bad thing. It's just the result of vastly different people wanting vastly different things and having significantly more opportunity to express it. This desire for consensus among moderates is just an expression of another age-old American tradition, fear of the upper-middle class of everything that is political.

Mass shootings in the US - table.[1] Only one in the 1970s, and that was a family affair. Far more since.

Terrorism in the United States.[2] Other than 9/11 and Oklahoma City, few non mass shooting incidents have killed many people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...

I don't think the comparative death-rate of an attack is necessarily indicative of the magnitude of division that caused it.

I think your data simply illustrates that terrorists mostly changed their methods after Columbine.

Your source illustrates that the total number of incidents was way higher in the 70s.

Vast majority of mass shootings are psychotics, not terrorists.

I think the big differentiator is the media coverage devoted to shooters now. Psychologists agree on this.

Yes, 538 did a couple of articles about how polarization is no worse than ever, but what is unusual today is how strongly the polarization lines up with political parties.

It is now notable to find some ideological question for which e.g. 80+% of Republicans do not agree on. The Democrats were lagging a bit on this, but are catching up rapidly.

They do note that at least some of this is due to people leaving the parties, but a lot of it is also due to people aligning their beliefs more with the parties.

Look at the bottom graph here[1]. Note that up through 2004 both parties had roughly the same response to the question of immigrants. Then steadily those opposed to immigration within the Democratic party either switched to the Republican party or, aligned their beliefs with the pro-immigration stance.

Similarly for basically my entire life (born in 1980) the country has been split 60/40 on abortion. However, the democratic party used to be just slightly above average for pro-life with the Republican party below average. Now over 80% of Democrats are pro-life, and Republicans have polled in the mid 30s for over a decade now.

1: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/FT_19...

I think two other factors to consider are the rise of partisan media after the repeal of the Fairness doctrine and suburbanization, both making it easier for people to spend time mostly hearing voices they agree with.

One thing I find interesting about older novels is that it seems to be more common than now to know people that you disagreed with, perhaps strongly, but still respected. One factor in this is probably religion: church attendance has been dropping for a long time so there’s less social attendance and some of the most popular denominations became very politically active in the late 1970s so they rapidly became less diverse.

I think suburbanization has had a much larger impact than partisan media. Most Americans consume centrist media[1], but there are very few places now where there isn't a large majority of either left or right[2]. With the current political atmosphere, even if 15% of the population is the opposite of the majority, they probably aren't going to feel very comfortable being vocal about it.

You're probably on to something with religion. I'm Roman Catholic, and I remember a lot of Democrats being around at the church where I grew up, and obviously the Catholic church is a fairly conservative organization, and both of my parents are staunch Republicans (The 2 times they didn't vote republican in a national election were when my dad voted for Perot in '92 and my mom voted for Clinton in '16 (but straight republican down-ballot in both cases)).

1: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/media-bubbles-arent-the...

2: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/purple-america-has-all-...

Do you mean 80% of democrats are pro-choice?

Whoops, yes. Too late to edit now

The war in Vietnam was not exactly unifying, especially not with the working class whose sons were being drafted.

Also, "more violence" is an understatement. Race riots in many major cities creating white flight, and thousands of domestic bombings a year.

Bold claims. Do you have any references that support any of them? Inquiring minds want to know.

[deleted]

Doesn't quite cut it, does it? "Go read some history books" is not a reference.

The parent comment made a bunch of statements. Asking the reader to read an entire book to verify the validity of any of them is wrong.

References come with page numbers for a reason.

There was nothing wrong with the parent comment. It would have been better to describe some of what's actually in the book, but it was still helpful information, obviously well-intended. I'm sure you didn't mean to bully js2 into deleting it, but please don't post like that to HN. There are kinder ways to ask for more information.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Oh, my apologies, I did not at all intend it to be taken like that.

I meant to say that while the book js2 linked is surely welcome information to have in this discussion, this doesn't absolve the OP of the burden to back the claims with something more substantial given how strong these claims are (and, as the thread shows, controversial).

Thanks! I'm glad I added that I was sure you didn't mean it that way.

I don't think they're that bold. The notion that congress is divided more strictly along sectarian lines today than the past is from this paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... which measures a decrease in cross-party voting over the last few generations.

The "common truth" is a bit more subjective, but I've definitely noticed people in my extended social groups having fewer and fewer information sources in common, as well as a smaller and smaller set of common beliefs. I'm not the only person I've come across who's had this impression.

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