Here, too, was a little slice of everyone: lawyers and construction workers, tech gurus, game programmers, students, housewives, schoolteachers, masseurs. For such a small group, we were remarkably diverse, from 22 different countries: Argentina, Panama, Peru, Japan, Malaysia, Ecuador, Russia, Scotland, Italy, Korea, Belgium, Belarus, South Africa, Mauritania, and on and on. We, too, were old and fat and white and brown and lithe and young.

In that room we were simply tango dancers, the same as anywhere else in the world. There were the usual dramatis personae: The young Icarus too eager to advance. The gentle, left-footed older gents. The pushy peacocks who would rather break a lady’s back than admit to their own flaws. A few truly top-notch talents. And us — two big-city blow-ins. We were welcomed, no questions asked. Soon this Thursday crowd became a kind of family, and the attendance-taking grandmother became a grandmother, also, to us.

Perhaps what surprised me most about suburban tango was its deafening indifference. At a time when Americans were said to be incapable of crossing party lines, when immigrants were demonized, when bigotry was running rife, there was no trace of this on Thursday nights. Whatever unrest raged across the country, or even down the road, it wasn’t raging here.

Two days after 2.3 million North Carolina voters filled their bubbles in for Donald Trump, and the unthinkable occurred, we went to tango. It was just another Thursday night. People drank their wine and ate their truffles. They made small talk and smiled and danced. I looked around the room to see if I could riddle out the voting records of our fellow dancers; I could not. No matter how well I knew these people’s bodies — from breastplates to bony joints to fleshy cheeks — I had no idea about their politics. In my heartbroken daze, I remember thinking that was comforting. That tango was the same.

No matter where you travel, or whose embrace you take, tango is tango. You’ll take a stranger in your arms, no questions asked — and cuddle. You’ll press your softest parts together — your cheeks, your chests. You will listen to the same song, and thump along the floor to the same beat, a pulse that echoes up your feet to thud in unison exactly where your torsos meet. You’ll hold this person’s hand. Between songs you might make even-tempered small talk. And afterward your partner’s scent will linger on your skin.

As the year drew to a close, the punch line of our national catastrophe appeared to be that we’d lost touch. That we’d all fallen into echo chambers, right and left, and nevermore the twain would meet. That, trapped in our respective prisons of like minds, we had forgotten how to listen.

But what we fail to do in politics — harness our shared humanity — we do so easily in dance. We embrace the other. We take into account another person’s comfort, how our pace and pressure feel. We compromise to compensate for differences in height, in weight, in skill. We listen to each other listen to the music. We negotiate our way around the crowded floor. We are indulgent, expressive, courteous when things go wrong. We take great mutual care.

If we are capable of this intimacy, then maybe we are not beyond repair.