In this day and age, with the gutter level of discourse used daily by politicians? With a media designed to elicit outrage and a populous that has been led to believe that what divides is far more important than what brings us together? Absolutely, at least until the madness goes away.
The politicians are a product of the media environment imo.
The blame lies in the race to the bottom that happened in news once it got competetive.
Until the innoculative meme of having an intuitive understanding of sampling (both of individual incidents and individual aspects of a thing) spreads throughout a decent portion of the populatiob, this awful situation will continue.
This is counterintuitive. If you emphasize politics, you end up selecting for the dominant viewpoint, thereby reducing diversity. If you don't emphasize politics, you end up selecting for the people who can do the job, which is almost certainly more diverse (to the extent the pipeline doesn't suffer the aforementioned political biases).
One of the keys to a diverse organization is to adopt policies and practices that don't strongly encourage uniformity. Political compatibility is one form of uniformity that can work to reduce diversity and inclusion. Perhaps "Handle With Care" might be a wise attitude?
Politics and religion are uniquely divisive subjects, and when you allow endless arguments about them, you create a rigid and hostile atmosphere that kills comity and intellectual collaboration. Everything becomes an argument about politics, and then activism, and than ostracism and purity spirals. It's a classic pattern.
So yes, you really should taboo political arguments if you don't want to drive away people with independent views.
Really, maybe focus on what you have in common and not what's different -- people have a lot more in common and agree about a lot more things than they realize.
