Everyone keeps mentioning pundits. I'm talking about regular folk.

I've seen people lamenting about how someone in their own family on Facebook has defriended them because of politics. I've personally seen three separate instances of this. The person who lost it and defriended is conservative in all three instances. In each case, the liberal person was saddened and disappointed to lose their perspective. There was no "Ha! Good riddance!" attitude. Far from it.

I can't even talk to my mom about anything political. At all. It always degrades into her yelling and ranting about something. Ad hominem galore. We have an otherwise wonderfully supportive and mutually respectful friendship. Even when things get a little political, we can sometimes get through it unscathed. But it's very, very touchy — not on my part, but on hers. Why is that?

I'm going to keep saying this until I'm blue in the face: we need to work together. In my view, the conservative side is severely lacking in meeting their responsibility for promoting reasonable discourse. They are a party without a leader and in a downward [if not a death] spiral. And they're taking everyone down with them. But we need them, we need their reasoned perspective. Not this histrionic, conspiratorial, paranoid BS that seems to rule the day.