To paraphrase the famous saying, evil succeeds when good men and women do nothing. I have seen this happen in my own country. Don't want to see it happen in the USA as well.
You can check out my twitter feed if you think I don't care about politics, but there are a ton of places where we can 'talk about these issues openly'. Just maybe spare this one site from all the politics? It tends to, uh, eclipse, everything else, as it is far more important.
Maybe, but maybe we'll lose this civility if we encourage this type of discussions.
Again these same types of arguments I've seen happen back home. People used to say stuff like "oh my god do we have to discuss politics here too??!" End result: the country slid down to authoritarianism and now everyone is fucked, even those who insisted on staying in their own little niche bubbles.
Even in an otherwise smart, rational and measured community, in this thread we're seeing appeals to emotion, partisan "outrage" and downvoted being used as a tool of disagreement.