How America's becoming polarized like Syria

One can't help but notice how life often imitates art, or even more tellingly these days, how an advanced society supposedly at the forefront of universal human harmony is beginning to uncannily resemble a very traditional one torn apart by primeval sectarianism.

What we clearly have nowadays in America - for those bold enough to call it out for what it really is - is the polarization between the cosmopolitan city and the parochial country; between progressive universal values and conservative exclusivist ones; between gender fluidity and rigid patriarchy.

Sound familiar? It's the exact kind of polarization which has violently cut a knife across the heart of Syria since the Arab spring erupted in 2011, killing up to nearly half a million in that country's subsequent civil war which has also displaced over 10 million others.

The notable difference, of course, is that our own sharpening identity-driven partisan divide is highly unlikely to turn physically bloody: our laws and institutions are far too entrenched and stable to allow that. But in the absence of a sober acknowledgement of the nature of the problem now making a mockery of our democratic process, even the most trusted and enduring features of the American system risk becoming weapons of increasingly destructive culture warfare.

Our democracy - and every society, in fact, whether democratic or undemocratic - can only properly function and attain its potential when its conflicting poles complement rather than repel each other. America surely doesn't have to descend into another civil war or anything even close to it to suffer the consequences of its deepening and ossifying division - and the entire world will be worse off for it, too.