Persecution Complexity

Forgive me, but I'm going to bombard you with a few links to some things.  The first is the source material upon which the other three are commenting, a study called Hidden Tribes: A Study of America's Polarized Landscape.  It's 160 pages long, and if you really want a pretty good summary of what it says you can read an article in The Atlantic, which approaches it from what I would call a Liberal/Moderate perspective.  But also give a moment to Rod Dreher's take on it from The American Conservative as well as the Libertarian spin from Reason.  I don't have the time or the inclination to sort out all the neurotic tendencies of each group, but what I find interesting is that they are all approaching this information as though it is a sort of revelation about the American people.
The findings of the study indicate, to put it in layman's terms, we are not as crazy as we look, but we do look pretty crazy right at the moment.  Oddly enough, I think all the commentary agrees on this: there is a large majority of people out there who are simply tired of this bull-pucky. They are tired of being called out and told to check their privilege, they are tired of rage-muppets like Sean Hannity, they are really tired of Donald Trump's twitter habit, they don't feel like they deserve the constant scolding and lecturing that they get from the PC police.  In short, and I can identify with this, they would not mind if the single digit percentages of both "progressive activists" and "devoted conservatives" were rounded up and shipped off to a large penal colony (unfortunately Australia is no longer available), to fight it out Thunderdome style.
Oh what a wonderful world it would be, but alas that solution would be pretty Nazi-esque and some new and cursed fringe elements would probably take up the mantle of driving us all crazy from both sides afresh. So, here we are America, over 80 percent of us, somewhere between "traditional liberal," and "traditional conservative," who honestly don't have that much that we deeply disagree upon.  We have let ourselves be hijacked by partisanship and paranoia.  Every one seems to feel persecuted, especially if they peek into the opposite echo chamber. How did such a small number of us get the power to make the rest of us miserable?
As with all power, it was given to them by the consent, or at least the tacit acceptance, of the "governed."  We have turned over sober assessment of our national struggles to those who profit from sensation and vitriol.  Good journalism is trying to make a comeback, but it's now got lots of competition.  Just look at the differences between the various responses to Hidden Tribes, they all kind of like what it says, but they lead with sensationalist (and smarmy) headlines: "Woke elite have no clothes!" that stoke up the people who already agree with them to draw clicks. Don't get me wrong, it's good to have a variety of voices taking on the data of something like this, but the sanest voices have to compete with the rhetorical equivalent of a drunk street preacher wearing no pants, and the internet degrades our ability to tell the difference.  It's good for us to realize that the center may just actually be holding, but I think that the center is holding sort of like the parents of two difficult toddlers trying to have a nice dinner, which is to say, not very well, but no one has gotten stabbed with a fork... yet.