By Selwyn Duke

Imagine that spouses in a marriage increasingly lived separate lives, socializing with different circles of friends, eating dinner apart, watching TV in separate rooms, and avoiding substantive discussion because they found it impossible to talk matters out. Wouldn’t you suspect they were heading for a break-up?

Now imagine that much of the division resulted because one spouse banned the other from his circle of friends, dinner table, and TV room and refused to discuss differences rationally, instead preferring to just hurl names. Whom would you most blame for an impending separation?

It used to be that while Americans were divided by party, they generally interacted together in other arenas such as church, community organizations, and social clubs. The modern versions of social clubs, writ large, are social media. This brings us to some striking recent news stories.

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