The largest effect on political division would come from a wide-spread — might one say, universal — revisiting of ethical reading and viewing. The skills needed to address writing and visual/aural presentations would go a long way to appreciating differing view-points on models of a current economy or present governance.
Among the first signs that a political conversation has broadened from the location of an individual within an economic or governance structure to a question of how things are working for those most disadvantaged within the current ways of operating is if those concerns occur across more than one generation. Multigenerational exile from participation in the levers of power indicates there is a structural weakness that, historically, will always grow and contribute to the downfall of any present organization of interlocking systems. The very attempt to stabilize a present moment increasingly endangers it over time.
To lift us from our current camps, there needs to be an acknowledgment that there is value in other ways to experience human life and life other-than-human. If the setting of another story or treatise cannot be affirmed as carrying a valid, even if a strange-to-us way of engaging the pitfalls and foibles of the everyday, we will soon end up with the Great Either/Or — where my Either is required to abolish your Or.
When we can’t trust the narrator or even a trickster narrator, there is no going further. When a reader has no curiosity about the characters and plot, that whole world is put out mind, placed in our personal landfill with no hope of becoming compost for nurturing intellect and relational growth.
Ethical reading and views are critical in an age of revisionist history, alternative facts that aren’t, and fear-based decisions in either economic or governmental settings.