Not too long ago, an anonymous commenter on one of my columns concluded that I took my stance on a particular issue because I “hate conservatives.”A couple of days later, a progressive friend who wanted to warn me about a hateful tweet aimed at a Muslim lobbying day at the Pennsylvania Capitol, jokingly observed that she tried to keep her feed “a happy bubble of the like-minded” but this one had slipped through.These two incidents speak volumes about where we are as a country these days. We’re deeply entrenched in our own worldviews, taking comfort among those who agree with us, and peering cautiously over the battlements at those who believe differently from ourselves.The schism is years in the making. But it feels more pronounced now in a time where bias confirmation is king, and whole communities of the like-minded (on the left and right) are no further than a click away.An October 2017 Pew poll found fewer Americans, in the time of peak Trump, harbor a mix of conservative and liberal viewpoints than they did during the Bush era in 2004.Overall, not quite a third of Americans (32 percent) now take a roughly equal number of conservative and liberal positions, that’s down from 38 percent in 2015, and off the cliff from the 49 percent who did in 1994 and 2004, Pew pollsters found.“Reflecting growing partisan gaps across most of the individual questions in the scale - even those where both parties have shifted in the same direction,” Pew pollsters concluded.