This Thanksgiving, don't ignore politics. Democracy depends on it.

Americans don't have the luxury of avoiding politics this Thanksgiving.

Our country has cleaved into two Americas that are bitterly divided by visions of the future. The brutal severing has left us glaring at one another across a cultural divide that threatens to swallow the democracy whole.

There are swastikas on the playground. Racial slurs on school walls. Emboldened white supremacists, once relegated to dark corners of the Internet, are now on video chanting "Hail Trump."

"I don't think we've had a challenge as great as we have now since the Civil War," said Robert Sternberg, a professor of human development at Cornell University and an expert on the psychology of hate.

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This year’s presidential election perverted our national identity in ways that are still coming into focus, and it has forced the country to reckon with a future that feels perilous for many Americans. With Thanksgiving just 16 days after an election defined by incivility, many people aren't thinking about the bread they will break, but about the salt that will pour into raw wounds.

We can look at it as a punishment, or as a chance for redemption.

A new Gallup poll finds that 77% of Americans, a new high, believe the nation is divided on important values. Experts on American political behavior say now more than ever, it’s imperative to have conversations with people who voted differently from you. Americans can’t work for a common good if they are resigned to the fact that they don't, and never will again, have anything in common.

This attitude doesn’t suggest naive optimism. It isn’t a dismissal of the devastating ways in which racism and sexism elevated Donald Trump to victory. It doesn’t disregard how difficult it is to combat the fake news that poisoned the campaign and is still drowning out responsible journalism.

Rather, it is a sober recognition that the contempt many Americans feel for one another may be more dangerous than any political decision Trump might make.

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"People have been consuming information that has not captured the nuances of human behavior and human thinking, and that is desperately what is needed right now," said D. Sunshine Hillygus, a professor of political science at Duke University who studies voter behavior.

Since the election, there has been a fragmented postmortem on Trump supporters: They rode a wave of populist anger. They rejected the political elite. They harbor a deep mistrust of major political parties. They subscribe to hardened gender roles. They reflect the growing rural-urban divide. They are a fierce repudiation of our first black president. They represent the last gasp of White America.

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These pronouncements are true, but they are also somewhat deficient. This, Hillygus said, is in large part because the media spent so much of the campaign focused on the horse race — on trying to figure out who was ahead and who was behind, on polling to try and predict the outcome — that it failed to capture the nuances of public opinion.

"Now we're trying to construct a narrative of why Trump won, and it's really not with the right data," Hillygus said. Exit polls will never tell the whole story.

As we sit down with friends and family this holiday, we do so with wearying suspicion. Rather than suffering silently or shrewdly deflecting, perhaps we can use the opportunity to make better sense of the narrative. How did we get here?

It's comfortable to talk to people we agree with, but it's not very democratic. Clarissa Hayward, a contemporary political theorist at Washington University in St. Louis who has written extensively on race, said that political polarization isn't just at the level of legislators. It's at the level of citizens. If we want to survive the next four years, we need dialogue.

"In political theory, when people talk about democracy, one of the big ideas is ‘deliberative democracy,’ which doesn't just involve voting, it's talking to people and listening to people about political ideas," she said. "Your duty isn't just to show up and cast a ballot, it's to engage in conversation."

The problem for many Americans is they can no longer agree on basic facts. The proliferation of fake news is a terrifying reality that news organizations and Facebook in particular are grappling with. It means, absurdly, that facts are no longer the starting point for a conversation about politics.

"What this election has brought out is how absolutely pernicious the Internet can be," Sternberg said. "We used to listen to Walter Cronkite and you knew what he was saying was to the best of his knowledge. Now people are reading fake news, or they are only looking at news that is slanted to what they believe. We have separated into two worlds that don't really have much in common, and neither understands the other."

This feels demoralizing — and it is. It suggests that for a Hillary Clinton supporter and a Trump supporter to have a shot at a civil conversation, they have to accept that they don't agree on things that have been proved true or exposed as false.

"It's not useful for people to debate the facts, because they will disagree," Hillygus said. "It's about trying to understand how people make up their minds, on what basis, and what their hopes are moving forward. This is where people may find some reassurance, because the caricatures about liberals and conservatives are really just that."

The Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-hate group, has documented more than 700 incidents of hateful harassment in the week following Trump's election. Pairing politics with turkey will not shift the extreme views informed by racial hatred. But it is not the case that every person at your table who voted for Trump falls into that category.

"The people who voted for Trump did so for a wide variety of reasons. Just because these incidents are happening doesn't mean the person sitting across from you endorses that behavior, it doesn't necessarily reflect their values or hopes for the country," Hillygus said.

Trump supporters owe it to Clinton supporters to try and understand why this election feels apocalyptic. Why it signals a step backward for civil rights, for women's rights, for progress. And liberals owe it to Trump supporters to understand why their discontent was so great that they viewed Trump as a savior. Why in standing up for themselves, they were willing to stand against African-Americans, Muslims, immigrants and women.

There are people who will never budge. There are walls that will not break, and sometimes we won't know it until we bruise pushing against them. It would be easy to throw our hands up and despair. But democracy is messy, and if we don't talk to one another, see one another, hear one another, what hope does the nation have?

Hate is part of our history, a cancer we will likely never cure. But we can put it in remission. And that means difficult conversations, sometimes over pie. It doesn't matter if the children are listening. In fact, if we do it right, we should hope they are.

"We're in a situation that is so dangerous in this country and everyone knows it," Sternberg says. "As bad as things are we have to find common ground because the country is falling apart. It really is. This is not who we want to be."

Alia Dastagir writes about media and culture for USA TODAY. You can follow her on Twitter @alia_e.