If you’re a conservative news junkie, Fox News is your safe space, even if you’d probably never call it that. You can watch it for days — indeed, weeks, months and years — on end without ever encountering a persuasively contrary opinion, at least one that isn’t instantly derided as unworthy of serious consideration. If you’re a liberal, it’s the same story on MSNBC.

When you open the op-ed pages of a newspaper, you’ll turn first to the columnist with whom you already know you’re likely to agree, so that you can see your already-correct opinions repeated and ratified once more. As for the writers with whom you disagree — whether it’s Krugman or Stephens, Kristof or Krauthammer — you’ve already concluded that they’re idiots or liars, so you’ll either skip over them or read them with smirking disdain.

And so it goes. We all believe that the system of checks and balances is a good idea for a well-functioning and prudent government. But where are the checks and balances in our own thinking — the check that whispers, “You could be wrong”; the balance that suggests, “There’s another way of thinking about it”?

This is what I fear we are at risk of losing in America today. Too many of our schools are producing students who have never learned properly to engage, understand or accept an alternative point of view. Too many of our citizens want to hear only from the people whose views they already share, and who will never change their minds about a thing. And too many of our media outlets see no problem in catering exclusively to these increasingly narrow and illiberal tastes.

We worry a lot these days about political polarization, the unpleasant choices such polarization leaves us with at the ballot box, its effects on what used to be our common values, our shared sense of nationhood. What we fail to recognize is that this polarization is a result of us getting exactly what we want — only to rue the consequences.

A month ago, I chose to do my small part in trying to swim against this particular current. After 16 productive and happy years as a conservative writer with the staunchly conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, I decided to switch teams to the mostly liberal editorial page of The New York Times.

In case you’re wondering, my opinions are just as conservative, reactionary and antediluvian as they’ve always been. My salary is pretty much the same. And, no, I wasn’t pushed out of my last job.