This essay, just by changing a few words here and there, could be advising zealous Trump supporters how to talk with militaristic pro-socialistic progressives; some of them placing comments here.

Dr. Tamerius writes how to conduct a civil, mutually beneficial conversation, with people of different views. As an engineer specializing in troubleshooting technical issues, before even attempting to find a solution to the problem in front of me, I try to find out first what is the cause of it. Politics never had been an easy subject for conversations at the family dinner, but we all sense that divisions became deeper; also, most of us became less tolerant and more dismissive toward people disagreeing with us. Hence, what has changed within the last 20 years or so that suddenly we cannot have civil conversations about politics?

I blame mass media. Editorial format changed from presenting a broad spectrum of views and arguments for and against them, into each media outlet becoming a propaganda tube for a narrow political orientation, dismissing everybody else. Hence, in order to address the roots of the problem Dr. Tamerius does not need to advise us in the NYT how to talk to an angry uncle supporting Donald Trump, or to a cousin zealously supporting Bernie Sanders. Instead, she should ask the NYT editors to change the editorial format there, so a broad spectrum of ideas would be analyzed and discussed, in the readers’ view and with readers participation. I wrote how it could be done, bringing the WSJ as an example: https://medium.com/discourse/it-is-editors-fault-28e22a279dcc

I accept that it might be hard to change the editorial format of the NYT; the WSJ did not buy it either. But, I find it unacceptable that Medium, claiming being innovative, adopted the same editorial formula as leading media outlets. As everywhere else, all texts recommended to me by Medium represent very narrow political agenda.