A lot of people are surprised to find out that people who don't live near them don't share their values.
The context of the disagreements was largely limited to newspapers and politicians. Some assumption of professionalism, editing and journalistic integrity was included with nationwide dialogues.
The internet, Twitter, political amplification, bot amplification, media consolidation, etc have made it 1000x worse.
Before, you could disagree on a topic and go about your day. Now you are beaten over the head with every topic constantly to remind you how much you disagree with it.
A lot of people prefer the comfort of ignorance to the discomfort of that knowledge.
A lot of people prefer the comfort of ignorance to the discomfort of that knowledge and even more prefer the comfort of their self made moral high horse from which they chastise everyone they deem unfit.
This is correct. The take away is something more along the lines of: when people don't know they disagree and therefore don't define themselves in terms of disagreement and further structure their lives around disagreement, they more readily work together; disagreements aren't attacks on personal branding/identity.
Maybe. I feel like those people might be living under a rock. With all the media today it seems unlikely that an individual isn't attacked on at least one belief. I know I see constant attacks on my beliefs.
The problem is that with fast transport, we are extending many laws to the larger geographic area (state or national level), which means increasing the size of the negatively affected groups since we are not homogeneous.
Edit: why disagree?