Why is American politics so heated?

[anvi]

People in other countries don't shy away, by any means, from expressing their political views.  I think there are, to generalize, three levels of contesting political discourse.  There are places and political environments where political disagreement is literally deadly, where the discourse itself promulgates hatred and that hatred is channelled into widely mobilized social violence.  There are other political environments where disagreement is. though clear and pointed, also much more civil, where political opponents don't accuse one another of moral failure and ignorance just because of policy disagreements.  I think the U.S. now is somewhere in the middle of this scale--political disagreements most of the time don't encourage mobilized violence, but the language people use about political opponents is often nasty and personal, as well as, very often, quite uninformed.  It's surely not as bad as it could be, but it could also be a lot more civil than it is.  This unnecessary level of heatedness is, in fact, one of things about American culture that turns me off the most.