The thing that irritates me about this comment and the ideology your subreddit represents (well, the pertinent thing) is that the popular world “polarization” obfuscates the massive difference there is between radicalism and dogmatism. That is to say, when two people disagree politically, some people like to imagine for various reasons that their level of animosity is a function of how different their political views are plus some ability to compartmentalize. These things are factors, but ones that lead to political illiteracy on their own.

Dogmatism is the common word for having a circumscribed set of “correct beliefs” and being hostile to any deviation from that set. Radicalism is the sheer extremity of one’s views. It’s entirely possible to be a radical and to be accepting of people, and it’s quite easy to be both a centrist and a dogmatist. We know that second one because that describes a huge portion of the Democratic base! They are people with very little commitment to progressivism who nonetheless are deeply hostile to people on both their left as well as their right.

Of course, sometimes the two traits coincide, like in the Republicans, which have a massive portion of their base that is both pretty radical and pretty dogmatic – though ironically they could be said to be accepting in an extraordinarily cynical way, what with how Evangelicals supported Trump, who is literally the fakest Christian to ever be President (“Two Corinthians”).

Anyway, my point for saying this is that hucksters, useful idiots, and some who I’m sure are good people like to characterize American politics as a situation where there has been a sizable shift towards radicalism. There are new radical (QAnon) and “radical” (Bernie socdem) movements today as there are in any age, but overwhelmingly the Democrats have been getting more conservative if you look past their lip-service, while the Republicans have mostly also become more conservative. The world doesn’t need more centrists, the Democratic Party has plenty! When Obama said he’s “less liberal in a lot of ways” than Richard Nixon, that wasn’t his attempt at absurdist humor!

What would actually be useful is functional empathy and – god forbid – a political ideology that has some ability to explain why people have political differences beyond some puritanical insinuation about moral failings. That does not mean we need to be nihilistic or appeasing with our actual political ideology as though nothing is true or else the truth is the median of whatever everyone happens to believe right now.

Paraphrasing Lafayette, “If the world is divided between people who say 2 + 2 is 6 and those who say 2 + 2 is 4, that does not make it the most reasonable position that 2 + 2 is 5.”

If I was writing it, I’d probably say that the camps in America are “4+4 is 44” and “4+4 is 64”, with “4+4 is 54” being the Enlightened Centrist answer (and ironically perhaps the most deeply irrational).