Political polarization may emerge because of conflicting desires, not beliefs

I'd also point out that those are strategies to achieve desires, not desires themselves. The associated desires might be something like financial security, a sense of importance, freedom etc.

> The Cavaliers – the nobles who had fought and lost the English Civil War – fled to Virginia. Historians who cross-checking Virginian immigrant lists against English records find that of Virginians whose opinions on the War were known, 98% were royalists.

> These aristocrats didn’t want to do their own work, so they brought with them tens of thousands of indentured servants; more than 75% of all Virginian immigrants arrived in this position. Some of these people came willingly on a system where their master paid their passage over and they would be free after a certain number of years; others were sent by the courts as punishments; still others were just plain kidnapped. The gender ratio was 4:1 in favor of men, and there were entire English gangs dedicated to kidnapping women and sending them to Virginia, where they fetched a high price.

> The Virginians tried their best to oppress white people. Really, they did. The depths to which they sank in trying to oppress white people almost boggle the imagination. There was a rule that if a female indentured servant became pregnant, a few extra years were added on to their indenture, supposedly because they would be working less hard during their pregnancy and child-rearing so it wasn’t fair to the master. Virginian aristocrats would rape their own female servants, then add a penalty term on to their indenture for becoming pregnant. That is an impressive level of chutzpah. But despite these efforts, eventually all the white people either died, or became too sluggish to be useful, or worst of all just finished up their indentures and became legally free. The aristocrats started importing black slaves as per the model that had sprung up in the Caribbean, and so the stage was set for the antebellum South we read about in history classes.

> The Virginian Cavaliers had an obsession with liberty, but needless to say it was not exactly a sort of liberty of which the ACLU would approve. [...] No, they said, we wouldn’t be free if we had to work, therefore we insist upon not working. No, we wouldn’t be free if we were limited by poverty, therefore we insist upon being extremely rich. Needless to say, this conception of freedom required first indentured servitude and later slavery to make it work, but the Virginians never claimed that the servants or slaves were free. That wasn’t the point. Freedom, like wealth, was properly distributed according to rank; nobles had as much as they wanted, the middle-class enough to get by on, and everyone else none at all. And a Virginian noble would have gone to his grave insisting that a civilization without slavery could never have citizens who were truly free.

From: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-see...

Yes, but the objecting individual is not fighting for his or her own rights. Pro-lifers consider themselves to be fighting for the rights of the unborn child.

Similarly, a society that permits slavery doesn't prevent an individual from choosing not to own slaves.

The society is not forcing its lifestyle on the objecting individual, per se, but it's forcing its lifestyle on the slaves, whom the objecting individual is concerned about.

To pick an example: Why is gun control even an issue? It didn't used to be - therefore something has changed that makes people want to ban guns. What is that? Is banning guns the only solution?

You can use the same logic with most of these.

    > How do you do that with abortion? (Just picking a controversial topic)
    > there is _literally_ no common ground

The question then is where do people stake their claims on the line between those endpoints. Some people think if the fetus is old enough to be viable if born that early, then it should be illegal to abort it. Others, if the fetus has a developed enough brain and heart to conceivably feel pain. Others, if its implanted. Others if it's fertilized.

And, of course, it's not a straight line, but more like a space. Some fetuses, regardless of age, are not viable because of genetic deformities and people pick different regions in that space where they are comfortable with terminating. There is another axis in the space related to how the pregnancy occurred—rape, incest, etc.

Within this space, you can find regions and boundaries where many people do have agreement. This is how governing works. There are no perfect solutions or black and white problems. It's about finding consensus and compromise, and picking something that is the most acceptable to the most people.

The real problem, I believe, is that there are powerful people who want to deliberately sabotage that process to their own ends. They want to convince us that there is no common ground, and that those who have a different preference are evil people who cannot be tolerated, much less worked with. They've found that if you create an enemy for people, you can get them to show up for polls and keep people in power. That's the real goal. They don't give a shit about abortion. They care about tax law and gerrymandering and other legislation that keeps the powerful in power. But abortion gets them to the polls.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_coalition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority

This is a really great point, and I am admittedly biased as someone that grew up moving 4 times across state lines. Meeting new people and figuring out the local 'vibe' was part of my upbringing.

Moving is hard, but it's doable. I write this as a much less ambitious person than most seem on HN (and older).

Why couldn't a government incentivize these people to move (say by offering subventions for moving out of some given place) instead of of incentivizing staying (as I understand your description to be)?

I'm fully ready to believe that government just can't be trusted with such far-reaching and non-obvious schemes, but I'm curious to know if someone can think of a way such a scheme would fail in practice (in other words: how is it like communism)?

Please visit a city council meeting.

> When you shit, it goes into everyone's water supply

When I take a shit it most certainly affects no one outside of Texas. There isn't a river in the country flowing fast enough to make my assertion false.

This is covered by tort law. If you can prove damages, you can have your grievances addressed.

If we adopt nationalized health care, your argument is that you should be able to dictate my dietary choices? Even if my goal is to do it like my grandfather that never once visited a doctor (died at 68, which is plenty for me)?

Edit: To be clear, the basic premise of yours that I quoted could be used to justify just about anything. That is a power I refuse to grant to any entity, no matter how good their intentions.

More recently, as you say, it often works by having 'sides' that marginalize each other.

I'm assuming that it's not going to be like that for the rest of human history, and suggesting that the polarization might not be a necessary outcome of people's desires, but rather an artifact of a politicians who don't know how to resolve them.

Not trolling – I might be wrong –people more knowledgeable about the left/right dichotomy are welcome to shed some light onto this.

And then you factor in the the original Progressive Party came out of the Republicans (i.e. Roosevelt).