I put this in GD because there might not be a factual answer to this.
The us left and right absolutely hate each other. Has this always been the case? I am not a student of political science and I have not really been exposed to much political news for longer than a couple decades.
But it seems to be that the level of hatred is higher than it has ever been in those two decades.
Has there been a recent time where they hated each other this much?
Possibly more divided when some states seceded and there was a civil war, with hundreds of thousands dead. Obviously not within the lifetime of anyone alive today.
Not exactly living memory but fair enough
Yes, the entirety of the Cold War.
Can you elaborate on this? I didn’t realise the us left and right had different views on the Cold War.
I doubt it. During the Cold War and immediately post-Cold War period, you saw justices like Scalia and Ginsburg get approved to the Supreme Court by votes of 97-0 and 98-0. You couldn’t possibly see a Supreme Court justice approved like that today.
Another sign of how divided the population is how baked-in and stable the red and blue vote are. In the Cold War era, elections fluctuated wildly because a lot of voters were moderate and willing to switch over. That’s why Dukakis, for instance, went from a 17-point lead in summer 1988 to losing by 8 percent just a few months later. Today, both the R’s and D’s start off with a guaranteed 40% of the vote and almost every presidential election is going to be fairly close.
The thing is, in general I don’t get a 1st-person sense of that kind of hate in my day-to-day interactions and observations. To many “The Left” and “The Right” are vague boogeymen, lurking somewhere out there, but rarely encountered in actuality (note I said “rarely” not “never” tho). Think of a crowd at a sporting event-as they are collectively cheering on their team (assuming it is a home crowd 90% pulling for the local outfit), do they, in the corner of their minds as they are shouting their encouragement, also think, “You know, about half of my fellow fans out there are The Enemy that I hate!” Do people really walk down the street, seething at every other person they see (and are categorizing as The Other)?
IOW the media and political figures have greatly amplified and exaggerated said divisions. The optimistic and idealistic side of myself keeps thinking they will all evaporate into nothingness at some point and we’ll realize that we aren’t so different after all. Or we’ll finally end up killing each other in droves.
The post WWII red scares, HUAC, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, COINTELPRO, etc, etc, etc.
I think it was at least as divided in the 60s.
Riots, hijacking, violence. You had civil rights and Vietnam driving it then. A big divide between the youth and the older adults.
Cities were burning then.
Today’s discourse is pretty loud and obnoxious, but the protesters had a harder time being heard back then.
I’d have to look these up. I am not as familiar with us history from back then as I am with during my lifetime.
Are you saying the FBI was not given bipartisan support in the beginning?
I just looked it up. Apparently that was 1908. Well before the Cold War.
J Edgar Hoover ran the FBI from its founding in 1935 until his death in 1972, and ran its predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation from 1924-35. So certainly during the Cold War.
But that’s before almost all of this board’s living memory.
Money quote from that section,
and future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who, Hoover maintained, was “the most dangerous man in the United States.”
If by “the left and right” you mean “relatively mainstream Democrats and Republicans”, I think it’s safe to say that the current level of rancor hasn’t been seen since the 19th century.
And it’s not really a good analogy, because the hatred of Communists was completely bipartisan during the cold war. Defining “the left” as fringe extremist groups like the CPUSA, which implies that the Democrats and Republicans were both on “the right”, seems to violate the spirit of what I think the OP is asking.
That’s the problem with citing Supreme Court justice approval votes (among many other things) of the Congress is not necessarily the best gauge of the political division in the country at a given time.
Yes, I am talking about “mainstream” politics
Yeah, the Democratic and Republican parties are not ‘the Left’ or ‘the Right’. These days those distinctions are more clear but it hasn’t always been that way.
Deep, stark divisions have always existed though, though the present-day definitions of “left” and “right” are recent and fluid innovations.
The durable divisions of US politics are extractive capitalism vs. workers, with related divisions of race and gender. These have always been starkly divided. It’s just that the marginalized people were easily crushed and destroyed whenever they challenged power, not least because slavery and patriarchy deprived many of their due political representation and power.
So what we’re seeing now isn’t really new division. It just seems new because it’s no longer the big dog beating up the underdog, we have a close-to-evenly matched dogfight.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone who lived through the 60s would want a repeat of that era.
One President being murdered, his successor quitting the race, his leading challenger being murdered, and the entire Southern wing of the Democratic Party suddenly breaking away and becoming the Southern wing of the Republican Party were only the highlight reel of what was going on.
From my memories, the Eighties didn’t feel divided for the simple reason that the conservatives were clearly and pretty powerfully dominant?