Is our fiercely tribal politics just a distortion of reality?

We live in extremely polarizing times.

Can anyone really dispute that?

The two major presidential candidates are calling each other a threat to democracy.

Donald Trump says Joe Biden is pulling the strings to have him jailed in the hush money case. Joe Biden says Donald Trump is a dictator in waiting.

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Biden says Trump’s election would lead to a national ban on abortion. Trump says Biden’s election would mean Democrats would keep aborting babies through the ninth month and even after birth.

Trump says Biden has opened the borders in ways that will lead to a crime surge across the country. Biden says Trump torpedoed a tough border security bill because he’d rather have the issue than a solution.

Most Republicans believe Trump that the 2020 election was stolen. Most Democrats believe that is a big lie.

Trump says the Jan. 6 defendants are hostages who are being held illegally. Biden says they were rightfully convicted for attacking police officers and trying to overturn the election.

There are exaggerations, distortions and outright falsehoods in these and many other statements. But they are believed or disbelieved based largely on pure partisanship. And nasty personal attacks have become so routine in this social media age that they are almost the price of admission.

But what if these are just a limited set of players – journalists, pundits, operatives, influencers and trolls – who are poisoning the atmosphere?

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, co-founders of Axios, explore that question in a thought-provoking piece:

"What if we've been deceived into thinking we're more divided, more dysfunctional and more defeated than we actually are?"

They’ve come up