You might be surprised to find that, in person, people are quite amenable to good faith discussions. It's the internet where slam dunks reign.
And, clearly, you must not have any insane MAGA family. I've tried to convince some family members that the Covid Vaccine isn't what gave me cancer, and it's like talking to brick wall. In their eyes, my cancer is my own fault because I pray to Fauci or something and this is just retribution.
Okay, some people are legitimately just not aligned with reality. I'm not calling them insane to be mean, I think they are actually, literally, insane. I don't know what happened to them.
Where I am from it is totally normal that one of your friends is left of you on the issue of housing while having a greens position on energy and being slightly conservative on migration. So instead of tribal symbolic ideas (party lines) you discuss the actual ideas and their merits.
Ideas can be discussed best when you detach them from those proposing them. It is better to let ideas die than people. If you judge people on how strong they tow the party line the only ones losing are the voters as they throw away their agency.
The partisan lens doesn't seem to offer any benefit to most people.
I don't have any hope for europe, either. They seem equally divorced from the material.
The internet is also where most person-to-person interaction is these days.
In person, you have a much more intimate situation.
It seems that many humans live on a "show" perspective of the world. It is hard to separate what is seen from what is in the eyes though.
Being funny is to put up a show, for example. Even if it is in person, for a single individual. It draws from the same essential stuff.
Intimacy can grow on that "acting" ground, in a sense that they're not mutually exclusive. Many things, in fact, can.
The internet does lack many of the social cues that one would expect from the real world. It also has cues the real world don't have, like logs and history. If it can grow animosity, it also can grow other stuff. Hopefully stuff less disruptive than animosity.
Animosity and comedy seem to be very basal, primitive feelings. Probably the ones that require less thinking. They're not bad, sometimes is good to think less. But not always.
I imagine something similar happened in the real world in the past too. But I could never be 100% sure of it.
Different, but analogous in some ways. Difficult to compare, but undeniably related.