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Following two recent interviews with two very different authors, I was offered an unexpectedly similar prescription for America’s political exhaustion. Keep in mind, their audiences and ideologies differ widely, but both arrived at the same conclusion that our collective politics has the ability to improve when we loosen our grip on certainty.

I interviewed both authors on Long Island months apart. The first was Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling chronicler of human behavior whose books, from “The Tipping Point” to “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” examine how societies think and change. The other was Dana Perino, co-host of “The Five” and former White House Press Secretary for George W. Bush. Her new novel, “Purple State,” explores political division through an unlikely romance.

I asked both versions of the same question: What can we do about the polarized state of American politics?

Gladwell’s answer. “Hold your values close, but your ideas loosely.”

It was an elegant way of saying to leave room for the possibility that you may not possess the full truth, and that strong convictions need not require intellectual rigidity. This is something that has become almost radical in modern politics. However, our Founding Fathers knew best. Our democracy depends on the willingness to test our assumptions and arrive at a common ground.

Disagreement, in that sense, is not a threat — it is a safeguard.

Weeks later, Perino echoed almost the same sentiment. Discussing her novel, she told me, “I encourage people to wear their politics loosely.”

That line sits at the heart of “Purple State,” a story about Dot Clarke, a Democratic operative from New York who moves to Wisconsin hoping to flip a deeply Republican congressional district. Instead, she finds herself falling for local Republican Danny Dawson.

In one revealing scene, Danny’s family friend explains to Dot why voters in the district once reliably supported Democrats but now vote overwhelmingly Republican. The family friend’s explanation is rooted in economic frustration. The feeling among many voters that national Democrats no longer understand their lives or respect their concerns.

Dot’s instinct is immediate and familiar: argue back. Correct the facts. Win the debate.

But the conversation does not culminate in ideological theater. Dot stops herself. Instead, she listens. She does not abandon her beliefs. She simply recognizes that there is more to be gained by hearing another person than by defeating that person.

“We have to listen to each other more,” Perino told me during our conversation.

She is right. As opposed to a free exchange of conversation and ideas, social media has become a performance hub. Algorithms reward outrage and tribal loyalty. Nuance disappears. Curiosity looks weak. Every disagreement becomes a moral emergency. Americans increasingly retreat into ideological echo chambers where there is little listening and plenty of shouting.

So we clench our arguments like fists and let our political identity harden into a personal identity. Soon enough, every debate becomes an existential ping-pong match, or worse, an exchange of bunker busters.

Yet outside the fever swamps of social media and cable television, most Americans do not live this way. Most citizens are not ideological absolutists, interested in permanent warfare. They hold conflicting views simultaneously; they worry about inflation and democracy; they value both freedom and stability; they distrust institutions but still hope those institutions can work.

America is not entirely red or blue. It is a far more complicated shade in between, and that middle ground is where democratic citizenship actually lives.

As the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of the American experiment, it is worth remembering that the Founders built a republic on disagreement managed through compromise. They understood that a diverse democracy would survive only if citizens accepted that no faction could permanently impose its will on everyone else.

That responsibility now belongs to us.

We do not need to abandon our principles. But we do need to leave room for the possibility that people we disagree with may still possess valid experiences and pieces of truth we ourselves cannot see.

That requires patience and discipline to suspend judgment long enough to understand why another person thinks the way they do.

While many political books today are built to inflame rather than illuminate, Perino’s novel takes a different approach with a deeper message that is surprisingly hopeful: our shared humanity is more durable than our ideology.

Like “The American President,” one of the great political films of the modern era, “Purple State” suggests that if our politics cannot always unite us, perhaps our personal relationships still can.

And perhaps this is where the country begins to find its way back.

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