The real grift has been in echo chambers changing peoples vocabulary such that we can use the same words but talk right past eachother, allowing extremely moderate positions to be reframed as extreme and making what ought to be minor disagreements unresolvable. People making an "I can see both sides" argument are completely missing the point - the issue is that most people can't see both sides, and even when they go out of their way to look at the other side's argument, they come away even more convinced that the other side's argument is dumb because it is dumb, if it is assumed everyone is speaking the same language. People haven't all suddenly become insane, or dumb, or unreasonable; we've just taken for granted that people geographically close to us using the same vocabulary would mean the same things, and thus we never developed the skills to translate between people who are in fact living in wildly different worlds possibly in the same household. And much of this is by design - pointing out how dumb someone else is, and complaining about the burden of dealing with these dumb people, takes so much less effort than actually doing the work to build consensus and make changes.