The noise of polarization is only the grinding away between factions of the governing elite

From Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction by Jack A. Goldstone.

A common misperception about revolutions is that they are acts of frustration—they happen when people say “We’re mad as hell and we won’t take it anymore.” Yet scholarly research has shown that this view is wrong.

Let us start by asking—“won’t take any more of what?” One possible answer is poverty: when people are so poor that their very survival is threatened, they rebel. This is not entirely wrong, for economic grievances often play a role in rebellions. Yet poverty is generally not associated with revolution. The worst poverty usually arises in the wake of crop failures and famines, yet the majority of famines—such as the great Irish potato famine of the 1840s—did not lead to revolutions.

In fact, revolutions occur more often in middle-income countries than in the very poorest nations. When the American Revolution occurred, the American colonists were far better off than European peasants. Even in Europe, the French Revolution of 1789 arose in a country whose peasants were generally better off than the peasants of “Russia, where revolution did not occur until more than a hundred years later. 

 

This is because poor peasants and workers cannot overthrow the government when faced with professional military forces determined to defend the regime. Revolutions can occur only when significant portions of the elites, and especially the military, defect or stand aside. Indeed, in most revolutions it is the elites who mobilize the population to help them overthrow the regime.

Some scholars, recognizing that sheer poverty may produce popular revolts but not revolutions, have argued that it is relative deprivation that drives revolution—when inequality or class differences grow unbearable, or when people’s expectations for further progress are dashed, they rise up in protest. But extreme inequality can just as easily lead to resignation and despair as to revolution; deep inequality also leaves the poor without the resources to create an effective revolutionary force. Throughout most of human history, great inequality and severe poverty have been justified by religion and tradition as natural and inevitable, and have been tolerated, even accepted, as the normal order of things.

What turns poverty or inequality into a motivation for revolution? It is the belief that these conditions are not inevitable but arise from the faults of the regime. Only when elites and popular groups blame the regime for unjust conditions—whether arising from the regime’s incompetence, corruption, or favoritism for certain groups at the expense of others—will people rise against it.

This makes sense.  If true, it has another implication.

The more prosperous a nation becomes, even if marred by rising inequality, the less incentive does any faction or fraction of the nation have to upset the apple cart.  Instead, one would expect to see rising vocal or performative conflict.  Anger and resentment expressed through speech rather than actions.

Which would seem to match the dynamics of today.  Journalists talk about polarization and intellectual pinheads speculate about civil war or division of the nation.  None of that is based on any reality.  Factions at the margin of the population and factions within the governing elite are vocally jostling for resources and power and prestige but nobody is really taking up arms or undertaking irrevocable actions.

It is a storm in a tea cup, much ado about nothing, the noise of factions grinding against one another for advantage.  And for most people, entirely irrelevant.