The RepubliCratic cancer needs to go, but I doubt it will.
Why? It actively votes against the will of the population, in service of the wealthy donors who fund their reelection campaigns.
While blame should be placed on politicians who use such issues to drive votes instead of tackling bigger, more boring challenges, we also have to fault the populace for being easily distracted, emotive, etc.
Wedge issues are what make them angry, or scared enough to post on social media, etc. It collectively is a dark pattern that subverts our tendency to fix broken things by making us believe that everything is broken.
Wedge issues are bad overall for society, but they are not anyone's "fault" except for society. What you're arguing connotes to me that people are victims of some kind, but the fact is the "dark pattern" works because people care about that stuff. I think they are logically incorrect for assigning these issues disproportionate weight, but like...they're free to lol, and it's not inherently invalid.
But then, take something like abortion. Some people really feel strongly about that issue (on both sides of the political spectrum). There are people who do vote based on that single issue alone. They are free voters who have constructed their moral/political rubric or w/e, and have elected to accord that single issue decisive importance in their political decisions. That would seem to me to be a feature, not a bug, of democracy.
The results of that diversion can be seen all over the country as things literally collapse, or fall apart.
Programs that are popular with the people consistently go to die in Congress.
All this with the support of a media that almost exclusively covers wedge issues, and ignores bipartisan screwjobs.
Yes I’m aware that the “War on Crime” and the “War on Drugs” was perpetrated by the Democratic and Republican Administrations in the 90s.
Extremists do indeed do this, and surely do it more than others...but I think we should always be very careful of the mind's tendency to convert positions on a spectrum into a binary representation.
A pattern that I propose can be observed on all social media including HN: if an article takes an abstract perspective upon politics (or any culture war topic), most people are pretty good at nuance and compromise....but if an article is discussing a specific, object level issue, it seems like the aggregate ability of commenters to discuss matters in a nuanced, non-biased manner massively decreases.
If for the sake of discussion we assume this theory to have a non-trivial amount of truth to it, it seems to me that it would be useful to come up with some theories of how this phenomenon could be detected and managed, or perhaps even reversed through collective effort (leveraging the innately unique differing perspective of members, combined with our ability to be self-aware and highly logical if that state of mind can be achieved (which I believe could be achieved through an explicit process/reminders/etc)).
Alternatively, humanity can continue doing exactly the same thing we are doing now, one aspect of which is using social media only for entertainment, suppressing discussion about using it to improve ourselves and the world, etc.
One party repeatedly blocks voting rights bills.
One party closes poll locations, gerrymanders and makes it harder to register and get ID's.
A two party duopoly is bad. But there's clearly a choice one could make between the two.