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That or as an Emmanuel Goldstein, if they're particularly odious. Think people's attitude toward Shkreli a few years back.
Of course not. But kind feelings fostered by intimate familiarity are no protection at all against the strong arm of the government, or of the mob.
On the contrary, kind feelings however they are fostered are a strong protection. Not necessarily at the individual level of course.
One of the reasons the IRA was forced to cone to the table was that their own people had begun to support them less due to a couple of bombing campaigns that killed children and OAPs. These victims were still of the outgroup, but their was outrage even with Catholic communities. How people felt about the victims killed in their name was crucial in the ceasefire.
Before that the British dialed back on internment and brutal tactics to suppress Catholics after British citizens condemned things like Bloody Sunday and several shootings where teenagers ended up dead. The government responds to public pressure.
In the US, it was seeing black people brutalized by the police and having dogs set on them while peacefully marching that triggered enough support, that finally tried to remove layers of legal discrimination.
Seeing your opponents as people, as lives lost and ruined is a key factor in keeping, and returning to peace, and even when those differences have been built on hundreds of years of hatred and violence, it can still be done. We can still see dead Protestants or dead Catholics as abhorrent even after all of that.
Red's and Blue's are no different in my experience. Most Americans whatever their affiliations do not want to see their opponents murdered. Your levels of division are increasing, but you're not even at the levels the US was in the 60's and 70's let alone where Northern Ireland was in the 60's and 70's. Tensions wax and wane over time. Your fatalism is I believe misplaced.
Back home we would say that everything is bigger in America. I recently attended a wedding in Texas, and the saying that everything in Texas is bigger, apparently makes Texas, the America of America. But the people I met in rural Texas were not particularly different than the people I meet in Pennsylvania (though the church was huge as was the liquor store!) A union of a Philly city boy and a Texas rural girl, and the union of their families. Even North to South, rural to urban, the divisions in America at the personal level, simply do not look that great especially compared to history.
And it is, make no mistake at the personal level that will drive or heal the divisions you do have. Mobs and governments can be dumb and violent and can do terrible things, no doubt. But if the next day the public looks at bodies on the street and is repulsed, then there is a cap. Even at the height of the BLM riots, very few people actually died compared to the numbers involved (though there were some). Even in mobs and with mobs facing armed police, largely widespread death was not the result. Even for those who believed an election was stolen, and were there when the decision was being made ended up with very little death and destruction. Everything may be bigger in America, except when it comes to mob and government violence it appears.
I am not American, but I think you will get through this as your great nation has got through so many other (in my view) worse positions.
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