“NEVER read the comments” is useful advice. It is rare for the discussions that take place underneath online articles to resemble Socratic quests for truth. Instead, warring antagonists stake out opposing positions and complex political debates are reduced to a stream of insults and vitriol.
Easy enough to ignore. But what to do when life starts to resemble the comments box? Exhibit A is the United States, where polarisation has poisoned politics, gummed up lawmaking and bestowed Donald Trump upon the world. In Europe, by contrast, multiparty systems, consensual traditions and memories of war have long mitigated against polarisation. But here, too, the air has begun to grow foul.
Start with the growing fashion for referendums, which by their nature force voters into opposing tribes. The Brexit campaign has been a carnival of bad-tempered distortion and exaggeration; even the brutal murder one week before the vote of Jo Cox, an anti-Brexit MP, failed to shame many partisans into dialling down the invective. Greece’s quixotic referendum on a bail-out offer one year ago set the country’s pro-European elite on a collision course with the…
