I think it's just a simple case of "when times are good, people cooperate, when times are bad, they turn on each other."
And right now, we're somewhere in-between, where things have stagnated but nothing's catastrophic yet. People turn on each other over tiny symbols, but very few people are actually choosing violence over words.
The problem is that the default trajectory is currently downward. Stocks grow at 6% while wages lose ground to inflation, and no one is doing anything to stop this (most of them don't even seem to realize this, they just have some intuition that the economy is being not-nice), so things are probably going to get worse until some Next-Big-Thing finally shakes things up.
And right now, we're somewhere in-between, where things have stagnated but nothing's catastrophic yet. People turn on each other over tiny symbols, but very few people are actually choosing violence over words.
The problem is that the default trajectory is currently downward. Stocks grow at 6% while wages lose ground to inflation, and no one is doing anything to stop this (most of them don't even seem to realize this, they just have some intuition that the economy is being not-nice), so things are probably going to get worse until some Next-Big-Thing finally shakes things up.