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I can't recall when I first realized that political discourse had become dangerously polarized, and that civility had gone the way of $2 gas, but I can still feel the moment when these truths were shoved in my face.

It was Oct. 1, 2003, outside a firehouse in Los Angeles. Democrats were staging a rally for Gov. Gray Davis, who was facing defeat in a recall election. Duf Sundheim, the Republican state chairman, was standing at the back of the crowd, and I went over to solicit his oppositional views. No sooner had he parted his lips to respond than protesters encircled us.

I yelled back something about "free speech," they hurled phrases about the 2000 election aftermath in Florida and the "Republican lapdog press," and we sparred for several minutes until I managed to get one comment from Sundheim, who had mainly been watching my neck veins throb.

Such an episode seems typical these days, with impassioned and aggrieved armies of the left and right hunkered in their respective trenches, battling 24/7 for the nation's soul. Now the very notion of empirical truth seems imperiled.

As I survey the political landscape, in the midst of a career change, it's clear we have entered an era in which nuance seems quaint. "Blue state facts" clash with "red state facts."

W.B. Yeats wrote, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold," and indeed it appears that our new century does not empower the voices of moderation.

Hyperbole is endemic. In January 2004, some small-town Iowa Democrats told me that if President Bush won a second term, they'd "move to Europe." Seven months later, in a Denver suburb, Republicans at a Dick Cheney rally told me that if John Kerry won the election, they'd "move to Antarctica," although their friends thought Australia would be warmer.

America has been polarized before, so the current schisms are not irrevocable. Yet, increasingly, people appear to segregate themselves along partisan lines. The 2004 crossover vote - 11 percent of Democrats for Bush, 6 percent of Republicans for Kerry - was the lowest in modern history.

Researchers have even found that Americans who relocate increasingly gravitate to communities where they feel comfortable politically. Demographer Bill Bishop has determined that, during the close election of 1976, only 25 percent of voters lived in counties that a presidential candidate carried by a landslide (20-point) margin. Three decades later, during the close election of 2004, nearly half of all voters lived in landslide counties.

And, Bishop believes, these patterns have consequences. People who are out step with their communities sometimes feel compelled to stay mum. Bishop has said that, when one Texas town planned a parade in 2002, local Democrats built a float, "but they couldn't convince one person to ride in the float and identify themselves as a Democrat."

Even when partisans meet socially, the results may not be pretty. During the 2004 campaign, in suburban Huntingdon Valley, semiretired engineer Herb Harris told me: "A bunch of us have a regular poker game, but we can't even bring up the election anymore because folks are so hot about it, so diametrically opposed."

Candidate Bush, back in the summer of 2000, said he wanted to end "the arms race of anger," but clearly no detente is in sight. Today liberals deride conservatives as "wing nuts," and conservatives trash liberals as "moonbats."

This mood poisons Capitol Hill, where centrist lawmakers are increasingly rare. As recently as 1997, 200 members of Congress volunteered to attend a bipartisan "civility retreat," but last year, the event was shelved for lack of attendance.

Nor is either side willing to compromise. Democrats, stung by years of defeat, refuse to consort with the enemy (and punish Democrats who do, as Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut can attest). And even though Republicans control all levers of federal power, their victory margins have been narrow. Hence their reluctance to concede anything, even rhetorically.

The adverse impact on governance seems obvious. In such a polarized climate, with so many ideological filters, with both sides targeting mainstream media referees, and with a divisive war in Iraq stoking these tensions, elected leaders cannot nudge Americans toward a shared sense of national purpose. And a well-oiled attack machine awaits whoever wins the presidency in 2008.

Smashmouth politics is not a new concept, of course. Look at the presidential election of 1800. Thomas Jefferson is on a nickel now, but in that campaign, he was widely denounced as a "howling atheist," a coward who fled battle during the War for Independence, a threat to the new Constitution (a cartoon showed him burning it), and a wimp whose "nerves are too weak to bear anxiety and difficulties." Jefferson, in turn, charged that the incumbent Federalists would "demolish the republic" by perpetuating their "reign of witches."

But the victorious Jefferson, unlike our last two presidents, governed without domestic political discord. He wasn't hated by a large swath of the population, or assailed as an illegitimate power-grabber. He didn't have to fear an open mike on C-Span, or a gaffe on YouTube. And political attacks in his day were penned in letters carried on horseback; back then, a "blackberry" was just a fruit.

Technology, however, didn't create the current climate; it merely feeds and perpetuates it. Much of today's polarization traces back to the social and cultural upheaval of the `60s - more specifically, to a backlash against the `60s, and against the liberal political establishment that dominated that era.

By the time Ronald Reagan came to Washington in 1980, activists on the right were equating liberalism with cultural permissiveness and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. In 1983, the chairman of the College Republicans, a firebrand named Jack Abramoff, declared that their job was not to "seek peaceful coexistence with the left. Our job is to remove them from power permanently."

Democrats in turn nursed their own grievances; in 1987, they targeted Reagan high court nominee Robert Bork purely on ideological grounds (a tactic known today as "borking"). They launched special-prosecutor probes of alleged wrongdoing by Reagan officials, and they ran Congress with an iron hand, freezing out GOP lawmakers (a tactic that incensed younger Republicans and sparked the rise of a combative upstart, Newt Gingrich).

Then came Bill Clinton, elected in 1992, the year I covered my first national campaign. Because he won only 43 percent of the vote, many conservatives viewed him as illegitimate. And because he seemed to embody `60s narcissism, he inflamed the ideological opposition.

In 1992, when Clinton was first plagued with the rumors, fanned by Arkansas Republicans, about his sex life, there was no Internet. At a Democratic meeting on Jan. 29, I heard a lament that seems quaint in retrospect. Party strategist Bob Squier said that "we've moved to ... a dangerous, evil phase. If something turns up in a sleazy supermarket tabloid, or if it floats around as an unsubstantiated rumor, then it's fair game."

Imagine that: The prime rumor-carrier of `92 was the National Star. When the tab ran two sex stories over a span of six days, most of the media yawned. Today, most Americans would find those same charges with the click of a mouse.

Long before the Internet helped launch the Monica Lewinsky scandal, conservatives were fuming about Clinton's morals. In 1996, I rode with the Clinton-bashing editor of the American Spectator, Emmett Tyrrell, when he peered out the window of his Mercedes and spied a condom at the curb. See that? he pointed. Right there. That was Clinton's fault, he railed, "the liberal mind-set at work. ... A growing number of Americans are alarmed about our moral degeneration. He's going to be a casualty of that awareness."

The '98 impeachment, and the subsequent Bush-Gore election flap in Florida, fueled Democratic anger, perpetuating the payback cycle. Today, the use of new technological tools (blogs, Web ads, podcasts) further erodes the middle ground. Many partisans now cherry-pick their favorite ideological news sources (and ignore facts they deem inconvenient), much the way we customize the music on our iPods.

The problem is, cyberspace lacks rules of empirical evidence. I recall a Milwaukee dinner, in February 2004, when we members of the "old media" pondered the "new media" rumor that John Kerry had once canoodled with an intern. We asked each other, "What do you know?" It turned out there was nothing to know. The Drudge Report had posted a tease, Rush Limbaugh had aired the rumor on his radio show (while his Web site ran a doctored photo of Kerry hugging Lewinsky), other sites spread it further, and the story lived for a week.

Our political leaders aren't well poised to change the tone, because most benefit from the polarization. The two most endangered species on Capitol Hill are moderate/liberal northern Republicans and moderate/conservative Southern Democrats. As recently as the early '90s, dozens of them had clout in the House and Senate, working across party lines. But not anymore. Today strong partisans lead each party; goaded by bloggers, they often view compromise as surrender.

All told, I've painted a grim picture. The other day, I phoned an expert who tracks our national mood - Gary Jacobson, at the University of California, San Diego - and asked, "Is there any hope?"

"There's not much chance the polarization will be reversed soon. But a lot depends on who we nominate next time. If it's Hillary Clinton and a Republican who is close to Christian conservatives, then we'll have more polarization. But if it's someone like a John McCain and a Mark Warner, we'll have a less polarized climate."

In the end, Jacobson said, "there's always reason to hope, because we have survived this kind of thing before. After all, we did have a civil war."

Dick Polman is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Readers may write to him at: Philadelphia Inquirer, P.O. Box 8263, Philadelphia, Pa. 19101, or by e-mail at dpolman@phillynews.com .

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