rewrite With politics broken, renewal begins ultra-locally in 6 to 8 words

Yet arriving at this impasse — hitting bottom, in a sense — may have the benefit of driving people toward fresh ways of solving problems and reaching consensus, at least on a local level.

While these proposed solutions remain experimental, they share some promising qualities: They enlist ordinary citizens, not career politicians, to address concerns that affect their communities, and they operate on a scaled-down, face-to-face basis.

One method with potential to restore a fractured civic landscape is known as deliberative polling. Developed at Stanford University, the deliberative polling process smooths collective problem-solving by setting key conditions in place. Forum leaders select a random sample of participants, which ensures that they will make up a representative cross section of the population racially, socially, and otherwise. Then the group works to figure out the best way forward on a hot-button issue, like how to regulate immigration or greenhouse gas emissions. Participants get ample time to learn about the issue from neutral sources, and they get to ask experts and policy makers any questions they want.

Finally, they meet in small discussion groups and then all together to figure out the fairest, most viable solutions. These talks play out much like jury deliberations, but with the goal of arriving at policy prescriptions rather than a verdict.

Several countries have used the process to aid policymaking, including Bulgaria, where a deliberative poll helped inform guidelines to make it easier for the disadvantaged Roma minority to integrate into Bulgarian society.

Deliberative polling wasn’t designed to squash partisan rancor. But no matter the topic, the process reduces polarization significantly. The more deeply and rigorously people study an issue, the easier it is for them to see nuances that don’t map neatly onto party-prescribed stances. In one Idaho-based deliberative poll that debated the merits of fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear power, long discussions spurred substantive changes in people’s views.

“People are really able to think together and talk together and work things out together much better than their leaders can,” says Perlmutter, whose book explores the deliberative process in detail.

What helps ensure deliberative polls’ success is that participants all have access to the same information about a topic, rather than being presented with partisan spin. But what’s also crucial is that the forums typically top out at a few hundred people, with participants hashing things out in far smaller groups than that.

Since ancestral times, humans have naturally cleaved into social groups of about 150, as British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has pointed out. In such tight-knit groups, people grow accountable to one another in ways that keep their exclusionary and destructive instincts at bay. It’s hard to argue that immigrants are vermin, or that conservatives are heartless, when you come to know members of those groups intimately — or when you work with them to map ways out of fossil fuel dependence or entrenched poverty.

Such personal engagement also helps to forge meaningful consensus. “Having gone through the experience, I know that I changed. I learned something,” one participant in the Idaho deliberative poll reflected. “I thought, boy, how effective could that be for other issues that face us.” Likewise in another study, when people felt close to their conversation partners, they were more likely to adopt aspects of their partners’ views as their own.

In her most recent book, “The Serviceberry,” biologist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer makes a similar point: What creates unified, thriving communities is the sense of obligation and reciprocity that stems from face-to-face exchange.

“The economic unit is ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ as all flourishing is mutual,” Kimmerer writes. “The prosperity of the community grows from the flow of relationships.” Such interdependence, a bedrock of Native American societies, defies the idea that when one person wins — politically or otherwise — someone else has to lose.

But it’s one thing to host a deliberative forum or to nurture a Kimmerer-style community of exchange where people share resources and forge close ties that promote consensus. It’s quite another to seed such communities across the country.

Deliberative polling works best when participants are a true cross section of the population, not the kinds of ambitious declared partisans who tend to rise to office. That means there’s no straightforward way to deploy the approach in school boards and state legislatures; new small-scale forums may have to be created from scratch. And even if healthier debates and relationships take root on a local level, online rabble-rousers will go on sowing the kind of strife that generates untold profit as it splinters us from within.

The most realistic hope may be that human-scale collaborative forums will generate a kind of grass-roots momentum, their success inspiring other communities to follow suit.

Liminal moments like this one are ripe for such transformations. Kimmerer notes that certain kinds of upheaval can spur surprising growth, in society as in nature. “Disruptions create gaps,” she writes in “The Serviceberry,” “openings and edges between the new and the dominant.”

Our fate depends on how we respond to these openings. While it might seem unthinkable to address tough issues across divides that are more like chasms, what that looks like in real life is often different than we imagine.

In reciprocal networks and deliberative polling forums — as at Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, where members of rival gangs work side by side — the question isn’t really “How do you see the world?” It’s” What do you have to offer?” When the goal is mutual flourishing amid a fractured national landscape, collaboration and contribution are the only real currencies of value and the only real ways to restore democratic engagement from the ground up.

Elizabeth Svoboda is a writer in San Jose, Calif., and the author of “What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness.” She is working on a book about the art and science of pacing.