> We should talk to each other more, not less.
It's a nice sentiment, but it implies that both sides have walked away from the middle more or less equidistantly, and the way to fix it is to walk back. The reality is that American left is still mostly center-left, while the American right has been steadily radicalizing over the past two decades.
Study after study shows the same thing: the average right wing voter today is more prone to groupthink (i.e. believing in party orthodoxy of the day), more likely to select news & information sources pandering to his agenda regardless of their adherence to truth, and views political opponents more negatively.
(This isn't to say that any of these behaviors are exclusive to the right - of course not, and the existence of HuffPo etc is the evidence to that. What's different is how strong and widespread it is.)
So for the left, walking back to the middle is not going to solve this, since the other guy walked much further away. To "meet them in the middle", you'd need to cross over to the right, to the point of abandoning the core platform values that have been there for a very long time. That's not going to happen.
This is a self-correcting problem, though. The side that goes on a quest for ideological purity at the expense of practicality, inevitably diminishes its own ranks by repeatedly purging those deemed as not pure enough (and on every iteration, the criteria become tighter and tighter). You can see this in practice - if you ask some Republican voters, more than half of their own party are "RINOs". And there's a positive feedback loop here - the smaller the party gets, the harder it is for it to hold onto political power, and the less incentive for someone who wants to actually do something (which requires power) to join or stay.
So that bubble is well on its way to bursting, and the best way to resolve matters is to help it along the way. Once it bursts and the right deals with the fallout, then we can talk about meeting in the middle etc.