Can American politics rid itself of its coarseness and polarization? No, certainly not in the short run.

But can we find more humane, practical ways of living our lives that put politics to use in a less destructive way?

Yes, we can do better if we rid ourselves of Trump obsession and focus on revitalizing our communities and neighborhoods where ordinary folks do basic, important ordinary stuff.

First, let’s consider what Trump obsession is and the harm it does. Then, for an alternative, we’ll take a journey to a small café in Bar Harbor, Maine.

At one level, Trump obsession is the liberals’ problem. Liberals have developed what New York Times columnist Frank Bruni calls a “peculiar-to-Trump hyperventilation” that has become an obsession. We progressives simply can’t shut up about Trump. We focus on news shows that criticize him. We ratchet up our language to berate him, his supporters and anything he does.

Trump talk, Trump talk, Trump talk — it’s repetitive to the point of becoming ritualistic.

Bruni, a strong and eloquent Trump critic, stresses how harmful this obsession is to progressives’ political goals, like oh, say, winning control of Congress in the 2018 election.

“When we constantly conjure the direst scenarios,” he writes, “we risk looking like ignorable hysterics — and bolstering his (Trump’s) grandiose claims of martyrdom — if events unfold in a less damnable fashion.”

More To Public Life Than National Politics

As I said, this is a progressive’s problem. That kind of obsession probably makes Republicans’ mouths water. Why should they care that liberals are snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory?

They should care because Trump obsession is harmful in another way that implicates and harms everyone, whether you like Trump or not.

Like any obsession, the Trump obsession fixates all of its attention on a single thing at the expense of everything else.

That one thing is national politics — what’s going on in “the nation’s Capitol,” a highfalutin’ term that only media people and politicians use. So the list includes health care, collusion, polarization, and other really huge stuff.

All this is essentially highly visible, sweeping tribal politics driven by arguably the most polarizing president in American history.

This obsessive inside-the-Beltway focus ignores what Bruni calls “private lives of less obvious note,” and what a Wall Street Journal writer more colorfully describes as “ordinary schmoes who sweat, toil, dream and sometimes scheme to make their communities better places.”

That’s you and me, the schmoes.

This civic work is political too, but it’s not the nation’s Capitol politics. Community work typically is a saner, less polarizing, more concrete, close to home kind of politics that stresses getting the job done over ideology and Trumpmania or Trumphobia.

You are less likely to start hyperventilating and hyperbolating.

So this year instead of hyper-focusing on the disaster of national politics, let’s validate the schmoes.

Don’t give up the fight against Trump, but don’t lose focus. Consider the things we can do in our communities to make the politics of ordinary folks more feasible and productive, because that’s where our lives are.

Find Your Everyday Joe

How so? That’s where the appropriately named Everyday Joe Café in Bar Harbor comes in.

Everyday Joe’s is not a café in the fancy sense, you know, as in Parisian café or café society. It’s a small, bright, newish breakfast and lunch place located near the end of a busy, touristy street, just enough off the beaten path for tourists to miss or ignore.

It’s a townie place where people comfortably sit and chat at their leisure. One day when I stopped by for coffee, the owner was teaching a half-dozen school kids in Everyday Joe T-shirts how to help out.

But I’m not writing a Yelp review here, so let’s get to it.  As the folk singer Dar Williams shows in her charming book “What I Found in a Thousands Towns,” cafes like Everyday Joe are an ideal catalyst for the kinds of community politics we need to enhance.

Williams, a musician who spends a lot of time on the road, became fascinated with communities that had that certain drive, with people expanding outside of their usual cocoons to work with others on community projects. Typically this drive is generated out of a café or some equivalent.

Two important dynamics emerge in these relaxed settings. One is positive proximity, meaning that people become familiar with and comfortable with others not like themselves.

The second is “the strength of weak ties,” where people become part of trust and communication networks that is broader than the folks they normally hang with.

If you are skeptical, curious, or just want more information, read her book, which is full of case studies.

All I want to do here is reorient you and get you thinking about spaces for developing relationships that can foster community projects.

Maybe the first thing we everyday Joes can do is to find everyday Joe places that can generate this community energy.

Look, I want Donald Trump gone as much as anyone, but we can’t let this fear and anger control our lives. If we do, Trump wins.

Fury, as Bruni writes, is not a strategy. Neither is despair or apathy. So we need to get cracking.  Remember, it’s a small world out there.