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Although it's true that the USA is "drowning in historically unprecedented wealth", I think there's more to it than that, I'm not sure that is even the main reason. As someone coming from a nation (Brazil) in the opposite situation, that is, "drowning in poverty", the polarization is still very similar to what's happening in the USA. The current left-wing president Lula was one decade ago (after operation car wash exposed massive corruption schemes) considered by the vast majority of the population as unredeemable scum (I don't have time to link sources but I would anedoctally put it in upwards of 80%), the idea that he would come back to compete in elections was laughable and many of his current supporters were criticizing him (incluiding Alexandre de Moraes for example).
What really changed from then to now was the mass adoption of internet social media and the posture of big media (TV, Journals, etc) that began to increasingly villanize right-wing candidates. I think what we're really presencing is how absolutely powerless the average person's mind is to propaganda. The level of groupthink by the average member of both political sides is extremely high, you can usually tell what they think about everything with 1 to 3 statements (I think it's more severe in the leftwing sphere but you can call me biased).
To summarize it, I think social media created spaces where people can consume propaganda 24/7 (not to mention be recommended even MORE propaganda therefore creating an isolated bubble of content to be consumed), and as internet threatened the monopoly of information from old big media, they escalated their levels of partisanship.
The way our voting systems works also helps polarization, cardinal voting is of utmost importance to help fixing this in my opinion.
I feel like Brazil has some odd similarities to the US that go underrated. Both are very large nations, by far the largest (in population) in our respective continents. Both rather spread out, with large chunks of wilderness. And we are both former slave-owning, plantation socities, which imported huge amounts of slaves and had a weird legal code for hundreds of years regarding race. That kind of thing leaves an impact. I feel like Brazilian politics are more similar to the US than Canada is.
Yeah, I do personally think of Brazil as sort of a "Tropical USA", other than the weird fact we once had a monarchy the other big difference is demographics/ethnicity which as a consequence reflects in each respective nation's economy. Outside of the rest of LATAM I would pick USA as the most similar when it comes to politics, we even had our own "Trump" (Bolsonaro) and the idea of "government interference on the rest of society should be minimal" seems to be increasingly unpopular with young american voters (it was never popular in Brazil I think).
I almost consider American problems as part of my problems because I know whatever ideas becomes popular there will eventually be imported here, if you look up the first flag of the Brazilian Republic it's basically the USA flag with green/yellow.
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