We often seem to live in two different political worlds. There’s the one we experience in real life, in which neighbors of different political views mostly get along fine. They might avoid certain topics of conversation, particularly if there are “In This House We Believe” yard signs that rule out certain topics peremptorily. Then there’s the world we experience through our screens — the phone and the computer, in which our neighbors and old high-school friends rant wildly and there’s constant talk about the fragility of our democracy and about deep-state coups. The culture war can often seem like an online-only role-playing game.
I’m often tempted to dismiss, in the name of the normalcy all around me, the insanity presented to me on the screens — even if I know that that normalcy has a lot of troubling trends. But there’s one trend that really indicates the depth of America’s cultural divide. Americans can no longer speak coherently about “our kids.” In fact, progressives and conservatives are engaged in a war of criminalizing the other side’s parenting.
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