Completely agree. Buttigieg (Mayor Pete) talked about this a great deal in his book. As a gay man, he recounted working with Mike Pence (Trump's VP) while Pence was governor of Indiana and he was mayor of South Bend. Talk about two guys you wouldn't expect to get along.

The key, as you pointed out, as did Buttigieg, is to identify areas where there are shared problems you can work together to solve. There's something about local government that seems to encourage this, in my opinion. Maybe you think gay people are awful and I go the pride march every year. Guess what, the water main is still leaking, and building permits take too long. Maybe we can just focus on working together to solve real problems, and accept that there are a range of social issues where we probably won't ever agree? And that's just fine?

I think we used to know how to do this in the United States, but something changed.