Our ancestors, of course, did not need these annual talking-points memos, pop-psychology monographs, and ego-building pep talks in order to sit down for a meal together. Many polite families banned politics at the table. And those who didn’t seem to have managed the matter without more than glancing assistance from the editorial page, because Americans had not yet become incurably embittered about their political opponents.

That bitterness is making our country worse. Name something you hate about politics, and it can probably be traced back at least partly to this implacable enmity. So allow me to suggest that right now, we don’t need better tactics for argument. Instead, we need to think less about all the things we hate about our fellow Americans, and to think more about all the reasons to love them. American politics may be broken, but America itself remains an amazing country. And that country is, among other things, a near-bottomless treasury of varied and remarkable human beings.

I’m not saying that you have to agree with those folks about everything, or even to say that those differences don’t matter so much. But — no matter what you may have read recently — people cannot be neatly divided into angels and demons, the righteous and the irredeemable. And we are in no danger, at the moment, of imagining our fellow Americans as better than they really are. Quite the opposite: we need to step back so that we can see more than the shadows and smudges and dark elements of the frame.