The "members of the other party are literally evil and uniformly commit (non-political) crimes against humanity" thing is somewhat overstated. There are a disturbing number of people who think that, but it's far enough from the norm that it's not hard to find a family gathering with nobody who thinks that.

Not that our politics aren't super weird and unusually contentious. They are, often even relative to the same people twenty years ago. It's just that the particular archetype you're citing here is still pretty unusual in the scheme of things.