Human communication is so densely laden with nuance and context and subtext that it takes soooo much work and a dose of generosity to have a real conversation that doesn’t spin off into something useless.
In a technical context you can define things clearly, but in a political context it’s just too hard, there are so many things that mean different things to different people.
My attempt in daily life to deal with this is to offer a place where my “side” is wrong to foster generosity then try to tightly circumscribe the thing we’re discussing. I think it sometimes works. But it’s a ton of conversational work with unclear payoffs.
I don’t see how we’re not doomed to usually have largely fruitless conversation in the current climate. I don’t like the approach, but I understand why people move towards a “screw convincing them, let’s rally the base.” Bit of a prisoner’s dilemma there, I think, where the whole country is left impoverished by the individually rational approach to rallying the base