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Notes -
To loosely spitball an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a while: maybe (some of) what we see as "partisan fraying" is actually happening mostly in cyberspace (it's an old word, but I think it applies here), where it's easy to un-person someone on the other side: "oh, that a troll/bot/foreign psyop, ban them." (see "words are violence") The virtual version (aspect?) of our culture really is fraying at the seams because there never was a notion of "national unity" in the borderless cyberspace. This bleeds over into meatspace mostly from people who can't see the difference: I think you have to be terminally online to accept "X is genocide" to logically precede "so we should kill X supporters" as reality. And political activism still has a huge meatspace component: you go to conventions, protests, volunteer to phone bank or go door-to-door that filters out someone radically, terminally online enough to actually choose violence.
But I could be very wrong.
ETA: Surely there are some limits on legitimate political organizations accepting purely-online contributions. Otherwise it seems a matter of time until "your so-called phone-bank volunteers that you never vetted in-person were actually call center workers in [foreign nation A] getting paid by [foreign nation B]". The JIDF et al already get looked at pretty askance.
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