I agree with your point about how widespread this stuff really is. I only hear about it through the filters of media reporting and social media experience. The behavior I describe in the post certainly exists in significant levels, but it might be limited to subcultures instead of bleeding into America’s culture as a whole.

That said, to the extent that our political culture is representative of our broader culture, I think there’s reason to suspect it’s pretty widespread. I don’t just mean that our president is the apotheosis of moral childishness, but also that the motivations on display throughout the last election cycle, and continuing on both sides, from the fake news right to the antifa left, provide evidence, I believe, of my Aristotelean claims.

I guess my hope is that America’s political culture isn’t actually America’s culture, and that those who live this behavior every day are really just a small but vocal subset. We’ll see.