Yesterday, a friend of mine (thanks, Kelli!) sent me this article in the New York Times: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/opinion/how-to-fix-politics.html. The article is well-written and I recommend that you read it. It's a topic that I've thought about a lot and noticed myself as an element of modern life, and this author does a good job of putting a name to it. In the old days, people had a few really good friends, and then they divided their time among a number of acquaintances and other groups, what the author calls "middle-ring organizations". Maybe you were a member of a few clubs, or a weekend volleyball team, or your kid's PTA group. Few people had tons of loose acquaintances unless you worked in something like sales or travelled a lot. There was no Facebook. Nowadays, we know a lot more people. We have a lot more connections. But we don't have any more time or brain capacity, so those connections have to come at the expense of something. Some of us lose some of our ability to make really close connections. Some of us sacrifice those medium connections; we don't participate in alumni groups or sports teams. We don't join professional organizations. In the article, the author talks about the effect this has on politics, which is essentially to polarize it. People connect with politics either at a very surface level (the outer ring) or at a very intense level, by making it part of their ego identification. They rarely have a healthy, mid-level amount of contact with politics. I'm familiar with this phenomenon, because I've always enjoyed medium-ring organizations, and I've watched them kind of wither and die in favor of Facebook groups. Who needs to meet with like-minded folks in person when you can meet them online? What's true of dating is true of other things; we either connect at a very surface level, or very intensely, but hardly ever in-between.
I can't claim to have an answer for this. Even if one tries to live a life that bucks this trend, you face an issue: to keep organizations moving you need the support of a community. It's all well and good to commit to "medium-ring" activities, but unless those around you do as well, it will die on the vine.
Which doesn't mean it isn't worth it to try.