TL;DR: Politics has occupied an overwhelming percentage of our thought. Our current challenge is to maintain connections with people we love, and to move politics back to the background, so it can be discussed in greater calm. Without that step, the ongoing back and forth becomes ever-increasingly destructive.

I am working hard to maintain relationships with my birth family. No one has cut me off, but I am absolutely self-censoring to maintain family harmony.

The problem here is that for all the founders of the US tried to avoid this - going to great lengths to do so - we are mired yet again in sectarian battle. We are discovering in real time that "politics" and "religion" have significant overlap in the mind, both being subsets of the part of our mind that I think of as "faith". In whom or in what do we have faith?

My family has faith in systems and individuals that I find to be absolutely dishonest and destructive. But I do not believe my family have dishonest or destructive motives.

This is the challenge. How do we address people's faith, which is to say their world-view or perception of how the world is structured and how it works? This is a question far deeper than simple intellectual argument can reach.

My family is scared. The doctrines in which they have placed their faith have led them to find life itself to be terrifying. I do not see it that way, but when I express to them what I do see, my perspective sends them into yet further emotional insanity.

It's actually kind of terrifying. I was in a conversation with my mother - who is near the end of her life - and she really really wants to talk about politics. It's her favorite topic of conversation. But the very conversation we were having, in which I tried - as gently as I knew how - to question some of her premises, created so much stress in her that it made her sick. It exhausted her to the point that I most definitely had to end that direction of conversation for her health.

I think the problem for all of us is we are putting way way too much energy into these disagreements. This site is actually as bad as anywhere else. We are all (me included) obsessing and allowing these divisions we face to affect our worldview, which is then strongly impacting our existence itself.

This cycle sometime plays out - as the OP points out - in some people cutting friends off. But it is deeper than that. We are defining life itself in terms of these disagreements, which means we are living our lives as discord. This is the pattern that must change, for all our sake.

For this reason I work hard to maintain open channels, most especially with those where I find the greatest and deepest disagreement. We need to learn again what we were better able to do a couple of decades ago: to live peacefully and productively with politics in the background, not defining every aspect of our existence.

The internet is a huge part of how this has gotten as far out of whack as it has.