A couple weeks ago, I got some exciting news. Steve Scully (formerly of CSPAN, presently of the Bipartisan Policy Center and Sirius XM) invited me to discuss One Daily Link on his radio show. I’m hoping up to firm up a date in the next week or two, and in the meantime I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts on the site, its goals, and our political climate. The first two items are fairly straightforward. The third, not so much. Too many factors influence our politics to express an honest opinion without qualifying oneself. In laying out what I might say, my thought process has gone something like this: the nation is polarized… though not as much as it might seem… but Donald Trump is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination… which probably won’t help our national dialogue… nor will the national left’s response to Donald Trump’s nomination… but we’re not hopelessly polarized. I would argue every one of those statements is true, both on its own and as a string of thoughts. But I also wouldn’t blame someone for hearing them and politely dismissing me outright.

That’s where today’s featured column comes in. In his piece “Polarization Is A Choice,” Matthew Yglesias posits that our polarization is fed by the narrative that polarization is inevitable. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. He even has numbers, as he always does, to back up what he’s saying and what One Daily Link is trying to correct. This whole site started with the idea that the angry commentary pervading our politics had started setting the tone for all of us. I was as guilty as anyone of assuming there was no point discussing politics with a person with whom I disagreed. My thinking went they’d just start a fight, so what was the point? But a fascinating thing happened when I started sidestepping that barrier. More often than not, those same people with whom I disagreed were extremely receptive to talking politics. They just had their hackles up because they assumed I had mine up, too. It’s an understandable default, but it’s protective more than practical. This isn’t to say all political conversations go well, but that’s not an excuse to stop having them. It’s a reason to have more of them. Because the less polarized we think we are, the less polarized we’ll be. Just look at the stats.