I agree. It got really intense roughly 10 years ago.

I had the same experience, but the difference these days seems to be that so many people can't NOT talk about politics. There are certain folk who just find a way to shoehorn it into any conversation. It is really draining.

This is anecdotal, of course.

The red scare famously effected social groups from the very wealthy to the poorest immigrant. Civil rights before it. Social-political exclusion is not new in the U.S, but how big the “I ignore politics and politics ignores me” group is, is highly variable. In good times, when people are generally happy, political representatives have a fewer differences and the “happily apolitical” group is very large. This aligns with the Clinton-Bush JR era.

The problem is, those eras are uncommon even in the U.S in the broader view of history, and depend entirely on being the right demographic. Such as being a Muslim American in the decade following 9/11. I can assure you, they did not experience the “friends of a different political party” effect at that time.