When I say the political coalitions are becoming more sorted and more polarized, I mean only that: there is less ideological overlap, fewer of us are caught in the middle, and there is more tension between the poles. Nothing about those dynamics makes the opinions partisans hold in 2020 more extreme than those held by their forebears. Banal views held widely in that era would get you run out of polite society today, and rightly so.
