This. Social Media has advanced the fiefdoms at an alarming rate. No matter how strange or out of touch your ideas, you can find similar people to reinforce them. When your only connection is with people that agree with you it becomes 'us vs them' and extremely insular. Throw in 'click bait' news and you have a growing level of fear and uncertainty that adds to the comfort of staying within your tribe.

Civil society takes work and we aren't doing that work in the US right now. No one wants to discuss things, they just want to yell down the other person. We need to get out on the front porch and talk instead of posting from our basements.

i mean, if that is the case then it happened in the 18th century when the industrial revolution caused the undoing of the jeffersonian ideal and the supremacy of the yeoman farmer. i tend to gather that most of this site's users are not planters, candlestick makers or slave owners. if anything destroyed the fabric of communities in post-new-deal-industrial-world-superpower-america, it was financialization and trade agreements.