Back in Canada, of my three closest friends, one voted LPC, another Green, and another CPC. This next election I imagine it will be different. The amount of tribalism Americans associate with their two parties has always been so fascinating to me.
No and it's not always true. They just have different shibboleths and areas you'd see them. Rust Belt and Farm belt come to mind here.
> Have Americans always allowed voting habits to dictate their choice of friends?
At least in my lifetime, things started to polarize around the GWB vs Kerry election. Opinions on the war/etc caused some people at my college to change some friendships based on political affiliations... most people would just avoid talking politics though (touching on your previous question, someone in collage from a fairly well off family kinda got the wrong message from American dad, yet he just made sure to stop talking about how pretty Ann Coulter was in front of left wing people.)
The elections after that amplified the split however. Obama's second election was, in my head, less 'contentious' than the first... but by 2016 I think everything was in full swing.
Not to the degree we see today. I think it's something that's really taken off in the last 8 to 10 years, and I remember seeing the first signs of it starting in maybe 2008. The Tea Party and Occupy Wallstreet movements seemed to be the leading indicators of a much more deepening divide.
It's not really surprising to me though. I think when you frame it as "allowing voting habits to dictate your choice of friends" it sounds superficial, but there are deep ethical and ideological divides. You're framing like people are saying "You voted for X and so we can't be friends", but I think a more accurate framing would be "X is an abhorrent belief and cannot in good conscience have a relationship with anyone who would support X or any politician who is in favor of X".
Believe it or not, this is _very different_ than it was maybe 20 years ago. I used to have good friends who were in the "other" party, and while we had pretty strong disagreements about policy, I never doubted that in the end we all wanted what was best for people, and our views of what the best outcomes would be were pretty aligned even if our ideas of how to get there were very different.
Today, that's not the case. There's almost no common ground to find.
Also, seeing the world in Black and White requires less effort than viewing it in shades of grey. And the rational mind seeks certainty and clarity, which makes Black and White an attractive option compared to uncertainty of ambiguous shades of grey.
Single Vision, William Blake called it.
The comment upthread more applies to how, on certain charged issues, trying to take a more nuanced take or point out that their side is not entirely correct on some minor point is likely to get you virtually shouted down because you're obviously in the pay of the other side. In general, it's better to just close the browser.
I want to gently push back on this, as I've seen the simple explanation you say itself become a black and white accepted truth meme when reality is more complicated. Yes, tribalism does play a role, but the harder truth is there is legitimate, logical self interest and game theory at play too. Game consoles, or computer OSes, are platforms with a significant network effect economic component. People do not generally buy these just for the thing itself, they buy it because of the software it enables them to run (be it games or something else). The more software it has, the more value it offers for the price. And the more it sells, the more economies of scale allows further pushing down the cost, improving the offering, or both. But the existence of any given piece of software depends on there being a critical mass of buyers. If you're the only one to buy into a given platform, it's not going to be supported long and the value of your purchase will be low, and whatever potential you hoped for will not happen. If 10-20% of the market buys in, then it'll likely go along ok, but a lot of what it gets will be ports or down to luck. If it has 30-50%, it's guaranteed to have solid support, as much as anything else. If it has 80%, it's going to have everything, mainstream stuff will be optimized to the max for it, ultra niche stuff only a few percent of the user base is interested in will still be big enough in absolute numbers to get developed. All of this applies to peripheral hardware as well. None of this even touches "networking" as-in multiple people collaborating, which is a whole further thing of course.
So it's directly in someone's individual short term interest if as many other people buy into their preferred platform as possible. To go back to GGP's example, anyone who liked the Playstation 2 simply got more bang for their buck over the Xbox or GameCube. There were far more games for it, far more peripherals, developers went the extra mile for it's weird baroque architecture and pushed it to the limit. Xbox and GC both got some really cool games as well, but they were never explored to the same extent.
Though platform markets also reveal another aspect related to "short term" above: while within a short period or generation it's good for an individual buyer if their platform dominates, over a medium to longer term it's inevitable that a dominant player will get lazy/greedy and start to abuse what they've got to the detriment of their customers. Further it's not necessarily easy for competition to spring back up. So there's another tension there between short term and medium/long term interests.
Still though, I think "tribalism" has come to get thrown around too much, or perhaps alternatively people forget that "tribes" can work, and remain important. Most big things in the world require groups, not individuals. That necessarily means that how other people think and act directly affects others as well. No human is an island. If you think one option is truly the best one for you, that itself isn't necessarily good enough if you can't get enough others to agree. But nobody agrees 100% of the time. So long term banding together, smoothing over some disagreements with some agreement and placing some value on the group collective power itself is a strategy that is proven to get things done and deliver for people. "Just tribalism" is too shallow by far.
So, yes, it is just tribalism even if it's mostly not unthinking tribalism for its own sake.
I personally blame not only the algorithms, but the focus of political parties on activating their more extreme constituents rather than on achieving reasonable compromise and effectively governing. It used to be you could have an actual substantive debate, but now at least one side will be either unable or unwilling to participate.
The Republicans in particular got so good at energizing the extreme “base” as an electoral strategy that it seems the whole party leadership was inadvertently replaced by the “base”, which makes it very hard to make progress.