I notice the same rhetoric, and the same forgetting-one’s-opponent-is-a-human-being, in Town Meetings here in Vermont. We’re all face-to-face, and many of the older crowd (some of the younger, too!) don’t have computers, don’t even have email addresses, much less Facebook pages. Yet people talk the same way, dehumanizing others, wanting to strip rights and privileges of others away even though those others are right there next to them. I think it’s more about ideology than social media – once ideological fervor takes over, it becomes an us-versus-them struggle. (Though I’m sure a lot of these folks have cable . . . hmm . . . It might be interesting to do a poll around media and politics at Town Meeting!)