Polarization Like Never Before? Pshaw!

More than once, I have recalled that during the Jefferson/John Adams years of our founding, nationally respected and admired gentlemen among the France-lovers and England-lovers would cross the street to avoid having to tip their hat to the opposition. The press, then, made no attempt to be neutral, or not to be personally scurrilous. Washington was labeled an incompetent and cowardly military commander. Jefferson was also called cowardly re a couple of incidents in his past of, apparently, leaving town when things were getting ugly.

Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the mood of our country was isolationist and anti-British. Roosevelt is still criticized for his policies which led Japan to take us on and praised for his in-war resistance, sometimes successful, to Churchill's policies, all of which were designed to maintain the British Empire. Polarization was so extreme that American heroes like Lindberg were labeled fascist if the agreed with any anti-England stance taken by Germany or Italy. (Then and now, almost all of Continental Europe reflects that anti-England mindset. And Britain still, wisely, stands just aloof enough to maintain its separation, by not joining the euro-zone, for example.)

In that context, repeated cluck-clucking in the foreign press about our Dem-Repub polarization falls just short of hypocritical. Most of the comments come from parliamentary democracies with proportional representation. So, a country has 4 to 9 parties, and they are forever forming and reforming coalitions. By the time the members of the latest coalition learn to work with each other, another "vote of confidence" dissolves it. Much more time is spent politicking than governing.
And how they love to evict a current prime minister. "Vote of confidence" is their "recall." That fits the philosophers' description of democracy as mob rule. Real world case: When President Truman fired Douglas MacArthur, I was among the millions who thought that, militarily, the General was right and the President was wrong but that Truman was right to assert civilian control over the military. Had there been a vote of confidence, Truman would have been kicked out.