In creating a world that continually reinforces what we believe, it gets harder to comprehend the attitudes animating others. The more distant our opponents are, the more likely we are to dismiss and dehumanize them. There’s no common ground, no acknowledgment that those who hold different views from us might have a legitimate point, an understandable grievance, a reasonable concern. This is when politics becomes blood sport.

We are in living through an especially partisan time now, but factionalism has always been a problem, under every type of political system. One possible answer comes from Montaigne, who pretty much invented the essay as we know it: “I embark upon discussion and argument with great ease and liberty,” he writes in “On the Art of Conversation.” “Since opinions do not find in me a ready soil to thrust and spread their roots into, no premise shocks me, no belief hurts me, no matter how opposite to my own they may be.”

“Whenever we meet opposition, we do not look to see if it is just, but how we can get out of it, rightly or wrongly,” he wrote a little later in the same essay. “Instead of welcoming arms we stretch out our claws.” Calmly, as always, he proposes a solution: “When I am contradicted it arouses my attention, not my wrath. I move toward the man who contradicts me: he is instructing me. The cause of truth ought to be common to both of us.”

Our low regard for politics is leading us to undervalue the craft of governing, to lose sight of the idea that there is anything at all that “ought to be common to both of us,” never mind truth. We are attracted to political novices and so-called outsiders, which leaves open the possibility of the rise of demagogic figures. Such a person might say, as the Republican nominee for president has: “I’ll give you everything. I will give you what you’ve been looking for for 50 years. I’m the only one.”

Our democratic belief that anyone can be a political leader paradoxically feeds into the anti-democratic belief that we should look to one person to quickly and easily save us. No one, alone, can fix it, and in our system of government, this authoritarian approach is a prescription for catastrophe. Our confusion about and contempt for politics is also blinding us to the possibility that it can advance the human good. There are those moments in American history when great issues of justice have been at stake, from ending slavery and segregation to opposing Communism and fascism to protecting the physically disabled and the unborn.

More often, though, politics is about making institutions work somewhat better, helping people’s lives at the margins, giving men and women the room to make the most of their talents and skills. It’s about making our schools better and our communities safer. The people who give up on politics and who reflexively denigrate those who are practitioners of it are doing a disservice to our country. Skepticism is fine; caustic cynicism is not.