How does political polarization manifest itself socially or in our daily lives?

[pbrower2a]

The polarization began before Donald Trump ran for President. It would still be here if Hillary Clinton were President.

Maybe the good thing about Donald Trump is that one has many good reasons for despising him if one is not a "yes-shrieker" from bad character to bad taste as well as his agenda.

Donald Trump is a mirror-image Marxist, the sort of person who sees the critique of capitalism at its work as the depiction of an ideal --  a world of subordination, conformity, inequality, and repression for the proles but unlimited indulgence for elites. Between him and a hard-core Marxist-Leninist is only one difference: that he endorses what Marx finds wrong in capitalism.

Would I date someone who claims to support Trump? Hell, no! Would I maintain a relationship once I found evidence of support for fervent support of the Trumpenstein monster? No.
I believe that I can make a solid conservative argument against him. First, I believe that the next really-successful Republican President will have more in common with Barack Obama in intelligence, preparation, deftness of communication, and overall morality than with Donald Judas Trump. Thus, a conservative Republican who can convince people that they must pay higher rents and taxes while working harder and longer for less if their world is better must reject cronyism and luxury. There has never been any great economic improvement that has not come without widespread sacrifice.

Second, the Right needs to get as tough on organized crime and white-collar crime as it gets (at least rhetorically) on street crime. Criminals themselves exploiters and abusers, parasites upon the rest of us. It may be mere coincidence, but the stock market took a big gain on the day that Bernie Madoff was arrested. 

Third, our economic elites need to recognize the working class for its contributions with fair pay and with the opportunity to find meaning in life other than in productive toil. Donald Trump could praise the vulgarity of masses of the white working class, as he is as vulgar as the stereotype of 'trailer trash'. (Please, liberals -- get phrases like that out of your lexicon. There's a wider array of people living in manufactured housing, which I consider the wave of the future in housing outside of the high-rise jungles of giant cities, than the old stereotype of people who listen to nothing but country music or can't get an overload of NASCAR racing on TV). I have done canvassing and census enumerating at such mass settlements of people in manufactured housing, and I have found a much wider diversity of people than you might have expected. I can see myself in such a place, and people who expect to hear country music will be surprised to hear a Shostakovich string quartet.

Fourth, recognize that more production of manufactured goods is unlikely to bring more happiness. Real progress implies living better on less, which means that a tablet that one can pick up at Wal*Mart for about $100 (less than the cost of two cartons of cancerettes) is far more useful and powerful than are more powerful and versatile than a fiendishly-expensive mainframe computer that was the norm in business as late as the 1960s. But the mainframe computer required a large number of people to program, feed data into, and maintain... and required huge amounts of electricity to operate and to keep the Data Processing Department from being as hot as a foundry. There were people who made very good incomes servicing the mainframe computers that are to modern data processing what horses and buggies and dirt roads were to the cars and early superhighways of the 1950s. But there is a trade-off between efficiency on the one side and jobs  and resource extraction on the other.
   

Would I date someone who admits that voting for Donald Trump is a mistake? Maybe.