> One thing that I see making the situation worse is the lack of common cause and identity. There was always party division, but the other side was still seen as your fellow Americans. Today, not only is there an opposing side, they are seen as an enemy that must be totally annihilated. If we continue down this road it's going to be disastrous because it's going to leave no room for dissent inside or outside politics.

This is just ignorance talking.

> I'm not saying that Americans never disagreed, war'd with each other, etc. That's not the point. The point is that we're losing that belief in an American ideal that helps keep us together while we debate our issues. The more divided we are, the more we'll be ripe for the picking by those who never cared about America in the first place.

Yes, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Civil War, Jim Crow laws, the ongoing South Revivalism, the Ludow Massacre, the failed Hearst Rebellion, the LA riots, and the Charlottestown demonstration kinda put a pin in the shiny red balloon of your idea.

But also, books like White House Burning go into detail on quite how intense historical political conflict has been in this country. It is not a "new" state of affairs. It's just that there was an incredible wave of prosperity from WW2 right up to the 90s that so much of our country grew complacent on, so that the only real arguments were on foreign policy.

I suppose also with the USSR disintegrating, America essentially never really recovered the idea of a true rival which it could convince itself justified political excess. Most of America is just not really able to accept the idea that China is that rival and the hypothetical Islamic Unified Super-Invasion never really happened.

> It's not just TV and social media, but a belief that America should be a hodge podge of cultures united by nothing but an empty consumerist culture.

People say this whole economic-and-trade-based-culture is empty and consumerist. And maybe it is. But the prior culture was essentially unchecked imperialism and a towering belief that freedom was only achievable at global scale via American intervention. Even if that meant short-term tyranny.

So maybe the "we build shared infrastructure for survival, comfort and prosperity" isn't so bad after all.

> It's pretty hard for things like forgiveness, giving the benefit of the doubt, and seeing each other as human beings to actually work in such a place when there are political interests that benefit by having those principles eliminated.

Well if you'd like to see who gets to experience that I'd suggest you read any recent story about a white man raping a young woman. They certainly experience this in spades. Maybe you can work out how the do it.

> A hostile, low trust society clicks more ragebait and gobbles more food to combat depression.

Millennials eat less though on average.

Snark aside, America has always been a land of thinly veiled violence in our rhetoric. You're not wrong that neoconservatism and neoliberalism have failed to establish a national identity, but that may be a sign of impending doom or a cause of real problems for real people. It may be because in an information society the entire concept of a national identity is dowdy and uncalled for.