My inclination is to say the hate is there, but also largely abstract. Negative partisanship, the academic term for loathing those selfish, short-sighted monsters on the other side, is on a long rise, even as positive partisan identification falls. In other words, someone on the left is now less likely than in the past to identify as a Democrat but more likely to outright hate Republicans — and vice versa for the right.

But such hate isn’t as clean-cut as some polling suggests. Negative partisans express more distaste for particular, polarizing political figures than the other party in general, and I suspect their hatred declines again — even ceases to be hatred at all — if asked to think of specific family and coworkers on the other side of the partisan line. There’s a lot of space between working oneself up while watching cable news and actually shooting or stabbing someone over politics. So far, I remain unconvinced that’s a space enough Americans would cross to produce conditions fairly labeled “civil war.”

Still, this mutual animosity and anger strikes me as a more compelling basis for a claim of movement toward civil war than what may be merely cyclical imaginations. In pre-Civil War Spain, children play fought as “leftists and rightists” rather than “cops and robbers,” Hilari Raguer, a historian and monk who was 8 years old when the war began, has recalled. If your kids start playing violent “Republicans and Democrats,” maybe sound the alarm.