When Politics was Civil, and Worked
Our world is facing challenges unprecidented in my memory, which goes back to WWII. Some changes become so entrenched that they are no longer noticed, rather it is just how thing seem always to have been.
There are several ways to think about this. Let's start with our country being founded on human slave labor accepted to reach the coalition between North and South. Other countries such as England, not having this need to form a new nation ended slavery before we did. Yes, we had a civil war where ostensibly the abolitionists won, yet Reconstruction, as described in Eric Foner's tome, never actually did the job. The residue of the old south resisted and the North just got tired of trying.
So for some six decades ex-slaves in the South lived under something close to de-facto slavery in the form of extreme Jim Crow. It was only in the mid 1940s when a Black man who did not have a steady job could be convicted, sentenced to servitude, and placed in vurtual enslavement to a planter. Not much difference.
In trying to find the beginning of the cleavage in partasanship, I would offer it was over the race issue, but during mos of the time it was the party of Lincoln, the Republicans who were fighting for the actual liberation of Blacks. This was how it was in the election of 1940, with Wendel Wilke against Franklin Roosevelt. Both promised to keep us out of the war that was raging in Europe, with one of the main differences being Wilkie more for civil rights for Negros - the term used then.
The campaign was pursued with a civility that would be impossible in todays world. FDR faced vicious attacks from various sources, but not from the opposition party. The media wouldn't understand the concept of "gotcha journalism." In fact Wilkie held a major press conference in the N.Y. aparment of his mistress, and none in the press corp mentioned that he also had a wife.
It's not as if these were "good times" rather the country was just starting to come out of the Depression, and the danger of war was real. Perhaps the difference was in the nature of what we now call the media. News and opinion was mediated by newspapers, and radio. There were those with vitriolic hatred towards the liberal "traiter to his class" Roosevelt such as Father Coughlin, but these groups, pro-and anti Nazi Germany were not backed into the substance of the two party system.
Joe Kennedy was sympathetic of the Nazi cause, yet still a major Democratic figure. Wilkie getting the Republican nomination could only have occurred during an era of unification that is almost incomprehensible in today's world. A few years after he lost, he was asked by FDR to take a trip to all of the regions at war, which he did and wrote about in a book, One World"
I don't know if we will ever see such times again, but I do feel that the extreme and escalating hatred between the two parties makes govenence all but impossible.
(Sorry for errors, but spellcheck not working)