Yeah. To some extent the polarization is an American thing, fueled in large part by particularly American characteristics like the electoral system, the politics-as-entertainment, the endless flood of elections, but as usual, American influence seeps through to other countries. I don't know Israeli politics that well, but from what I've seen as outsider it's a bit different, with a wide range of parties but still a rather strong divide between the left and the right on certain issues, more so than in many other multi-party democracies...

I've been thinking a lot about this lately, especially now that it's increasingly becoming a question of not only disagreeing on viewpoints, but looking at entirely different sets of facts and dismissing the facts of the other side as fake news or obvious propaganda. So much of American politics is this game of trying to reduce 'the other side' to its most extreme members while pretending that on your own side everything is fine, and generally viewing everything with a partisan bias. Of course it becomes hard to understand then how anyone could vote for 'the other side' and fail to see how horrible they are.

Heh. Yeah, it's scary how much of our time it can take up - and how we miss it if we try to cut down on it.