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Comment by rurp | Hacker News Reader

I would go further and say we actually do have quite a bit of hard evidence that societal disagreements were more civil several decades ago. Bipartisan legislation, violent threats against public figures, mass murders, and attempts to violently overthrow an election have all gotten objectively worse since the rise of the internet.

I don't know how much the internet has caused this deterioration, but it is strongly correlated.

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Just looking at the 90s to today is ignoring an awful lot of context about what political tensions in the US actually used to look like.

Just over 100 years ago, political disagreements in West Virginia over unionization led to a full-scale paramilitary battle at Blair Mountain [1], with upwards of 13,000 people involved and complete with the anti-unionization side bringing in private planes as improved bombers.

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

You say objectively, so where's your data? I must be very hard to measure pre-internet violent threats. I know someone who personally told me he'd kill George Bush if he had the chance. That won't be in your records, so how can you measure it?

The, uh, US civil war.

The Tulsa massacre.

Emmett Till

Murders have dropped every decade for the last five.

There were bombings almost every day in the US in the 1970’s.

We're not allowed to talk about those any more.

Which is a weird phenomenon in and of itself right?

The amount of political violence pre-internet is just an order of magnitude higher than today’s. Most young people (millennials, Gen Z) are completely unaware - unless you studied this stuff - that e.g. the Senate building was bombed in 1983 by a bunch of leftists upset over the US’s involvement in Lebanon.

This is to say, I’m skeptical of the argument that the internet has made things worse. Definitely not better, maybe not worse.

I think it depends how you look at it. The intensity of the conflict has diminished, but I think the scope of the conflict has increased. There are fewer bombs going off, but there seems to be a lot more family estrangement due to political differences.

The partisan lines in my extended family haven't changed for as long as I can remember, but there are fewer get-togethers and more political arguments at the dinner table when they do happen. The aunt and uncle that once were my god parents have now stopped talking to my parents; nobody's political opinions changed but differences in opinion that were once barely worth mentioning are now considered actually evil.

I think it depends on what's considered political. Family estrangement due to religious differences (such as marrying a catholic) was so commonplace it was practically a sitcom joke. There was also family estrangement about potentially dating outside your race.

Heh, my family is mixed Lutheran and Catholic, but that's not the line it split along. My mother and her sister are Lutheran, while their husbands are Catholics. I'm aware of this social schism only in the academic sense; it's not something I've ever personally seen or experienced.

These are people who more or less believe the same sort of thing, but disagree about which party will best implement it. It's a difference that used to not matter very much; my cousins were raised almost identically to me and my siblings. There is no real difference in social or economic class, lifestyle, or community. Simply partisan affiliation.

I should clarify that I'm inquiring whether or not not dating based on religion or race is considered political, because if it is, it brings into question the idea that estrangement for political reasons is a relatively new phenomenon. It might be better to suggest estrangement for political party affiliation might be relatively new.

I mostly agree with this. I think we can describe it as: vertical conflict has decreased (kinetic action up and down the political spectrum), while horizontal conflict has increased (passive action across the political spectrum). Things like actual assassination attempts against major figures in government (Justice Kavanaugh's assassination attempt notwithstanding) are not as common today as they were 40-50 years ago, while separation from peers for political reasons is much more common.

> that e.g. the Senate building was bombed in 1983 by a bunch of leftists upset over the US’s involvement in Lebanon.

This has to be fascist propaganda because we know for a fact that Jan 6 was the first time the Capitol was ever attacked.

See also the pro-Puerto Rican independence terrorists who in the 1950s a) invaded the Capitol (!) to try to assassinate Congressmen, and b) invaded the temporary White House to try to assassinate Harry Truman (!!). Completely forgotten about in popular memory, despite their murdering law enforcement in the process.

> societal disagreements were more civil several decades ago.

That's because white people violently killed, lynched, and massacred everyone that dared to cause "trouble" prior to the Civil Rights Movement.

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