Lost Friendships Break Hearts and Nations

> Damon argues (and I think he’s exactly right) that the prevalence of online relationships rooted in affinity or faction help explain our toxic politics.

Politics in the US has usually been toxic, but hasn't usually had “online relationships”; its pretty much a staple of a two-party system in a coherent ideological alignment, especially the longer its been in the ideological alignment.

I think people start attributing it to all kinds of mostly-irrelevant hypermodern causes because their view of history is focussed on the relatively modern (say, post-WW2) period, most of which prior (coincidentally, not causally) to the rise of the internet as a public medium was in an unusually long transitory period of incoherent alignment (where salient ideological groupings weren't aligned with major party divides) due to the overlapping New Deal- and Civil Rights-triggered realignments from the 1930s to about the mid-1990s.

>Damon argues (and I think he’s exactly right) that the prevalence of online relationships rooted in affinity or faction help explain our toxic politics.

Maybe online phyles *result* from political factions pushing them out of real communities, instead.

>Yes, politics matters, but if our prime answer to the loss of healthy friendship is political rather than personal, then the crisis will only deepen.

A reader who believes "everything is political" will see their own toxic practices vindicated by this, even though it suggests yielding politics to friendship. But it only suggests such as a last resort, when "you can’t fact-check, plead, or argue a person out of a conspiracy", rather than a principle of love. This tack does not inspire strength.