Growing up in that little bubble of existence that seems to be somewhat contradictory towards actual reality, you see politics. You see dysfunction. Growing up, I saw the liberal anger to Bush II and the conservative anger towards Obama. They are fundamentally the same thing: angry mobs seeing the opponent as the enemy.
And it's not just Washington. It's endemic on the Internet. GIFT is in full effect. Police violence, feminism, US foreign policy, other countries' foreign policy, terrorism, and just about anything else you could imagine are subjected to the most vitriolic debates where anyone that disagrees is a heretic to truth, decency, and morality. It is utterly, utterly counterproductive.
What worries me greatly is that many causes I can support wholeheartedly are succumbing to the same trap of overemotional demonization of the opponent. For example: a reasonably large Skype chatroom of which I am a member fell victim to this. A transgender member of the chatroom was talking about how she had been harassed online by a transphobic bigot. The chatroom comforted her, as was proper and kind; the bigotry as expressed by her harasser is disgusting and the highest form of prejudice and immorality.
My tacit objection was when a member of the chatroom started loudly calling for the mass execution of social conservatives who shared such abhorrent beliefs. As committed to equality I am, I cannot support such language. It casts the bigots as evil; this is a defensible position but not one that those on the fence are likely to heed.
What must be avoided is what TvTropes calls "Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy," which, in media, is when two conflicted sides are both so repulsive that the audience ceases to care about the problems of the characters, as just as they may be. At worst, the audience will actively cheer on violent conflict between the two sides, believing that the more of each die, the better off the world will be.
Look at what that member was calling for: political violence on the scale of a totalitarian state. This is what will have activists branded as extremist, murderous loons. People are not as discerning as they ought to be, unfortunately, and tend to led bad apples spoil the bunch.
The common frame of debate in Washington's morass of gridlock is that the other side is completely, utterly evil, and not worth cooperating with or compromising with on about anything. Republicans call Democrats baby murderers, gun-grabbers, and Communists, while Democrats call Republicans religious authoritarians, extremists, corporate lackeys, and allege them of engaging in a 'War on Women.' What these various terms serve to do is merely to alienate those on the fence from the political process, driving American (and I would imagine similar phenomena in other countries) voter turnout to an embarrassing low.
Rather than blatant demonization, those who engage in debate or political discussion in general must see the opposing view as incorrect, not evil. They ought not to be crusaders for their own definition of justice; they must think logically, debunking, not branding as heresy, the opinion that they deem wrong. This is the key to balanced discourse; the last time we had a Crusade, those on the other side were less than enthused.
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