It's funny--as I read this, I kept jumping to "And you know whose fault that is?"
Look: human beings are righteous, inflexible, stubborn creatures. We want to be right above all things. We'd much rather be right than happy. Even when we're wrong. It's human nature.
I'm not convinced that now is a particularly special time in history for that. It could be that a veneer of civility that has been there in the past is now not there. In some ways that's a good thing. You have to deal with what's really there before anything can be done about it, and sugarcoating or veneering civility over it is a great way not to deal with what's really there.
Only question is whether people are committed to doing anything about it.