I use steelmanning to connect across cultural divides. This way I don't end up writing off half the country as deplorables. If I simply wrote them off in this way it would be contributing to the decay of our social fabric. So instead I intend to mend the social fabric by attempting to understand the emotional place that these deplorable ideas come from, which by themselves are often quite reasonable. Isolation is often how people end up with these ideas, so it's important to connect to them, and ultimately to love them.

That goes for both sides of our political system, and beyond to the rural urban divide, the gender divide, the racial divide, the class divide, etc.

I think I found out about by reading rationalist stuff. E.g. Less wrong and slatestarcodex.