This is the web today. I stopped reading comments on most articles long ago because it's always like you described. This does nobody any good. Actually, it does politicians good to keep us separated down the middle. We are at our weakest in this position.
I knew this reminded me something, it's Chomsky (I had to google it):
'The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.'
Not helping that modern marketing has taken to game such comment sections (never mind the wider social media field) on behalf of their paymasters.
In a sense the net, first seen as flattening the classes, have instead empowered the elite to make both Stasi and Bernays look like bungling idiots.
Rather than crude manual policing etc, computers can both monitor all activity online (and offline, thanks to the likes of smartphones) and insert data to affect opinions and future activity.
I don't think though that othering policitians as "them" and identifying "the people" as an "us" helps us handle the complexity of social and political discourse either...
