The current polarization is mainly due the social networks and the media in the digital age that lives on outrage. Any comparison with previous eras is moot.
It has nothing to do with ballooning university tuitions that finance a bloated administration and fancy building while providing a much poorer education.
It's all the ability of the proles to read uncensored news
Outrage is a common theme of previous generations, you only have to take a casual glance at any decade to find a movement fuelled by outrage.
The temperance movement that lead to prohibition. McCarthyism. Even the rise of Nazism.
Of course not. Digital age has made measuring what works better to get clicks possible, and this has completely changed the incentives of the news industry.
1. As a random example
There's lots of examples to look at in history of "outrage" that spread through a huge part of the world, for example inquisitions or witch trials.
Slower, but I'm sure if you thought harder or had better knowledge of history than me you could come up with examples of things that happened before even the printing press was invented.
There's probably plenty of examples in Roman history that spread out from Rome to its conquests.
I do not mean to claim they were reason for the revolution, but more that the media as we know them now are basically tame compared to a lot that was written in the past.
It takes more then just unhappiness and anger for revolution to happen anyway. The necessary condition is that the state must be weak and unable to suppress the threat to itself. You can hold people in arbitrary bad conditions for infinitely long time if you have enough power. And they won't do revolution, because you will make it impossible.
Which leads to, polarization is not symmetrical. Some groups of society move toward extreme much faster then others.
Also, we do have less polarization then France had before French revolution.
I kind of think the warning signs are almost always only accurately seen in hindsight.
There was a time when the printing press was regarded as as scary a technology as radio would be later, TV would be later, and social media is today.