As we vote, we don't strike a ±10 on some symmetrical scale; rather we decide between 0-10 on some speed range.
It correlates with the strong observation in poli. sci. that the older we get, the more we tend to vote conservatively (the younger we are, the less we stand to lose since a life has yet to be made and wealth be accumulated; conversely the older we get, the more stakes we have to lose if we upend the status quo). This seems true across cultures and generations, and corroborated by a slew of psych. data.
Your "normal" range of people (able to have a reasonable discussion etc.) is a fat 70-ish % of the population, centered on some '5' speed mark. Astoundingly, these people both left and right are ignored by insanely polarized politics who mostly focus on the edges, the extremes, where electoral battles are seemingly won in a dirty side-effect of the uninominal voting scheme. Hint: rank-based choice is one easy solution to this problem, but notice how most parties around the democratic world seem to ignore that yet simple and easily computable fact as of the 21st century.
What I mean is that we choose to mislabel and misunderstand the problems and their solution; somehow this insane polarized and wildly suboptimal situation is maintained by whoever's in charge at most political forces as we speak.
I think it's time we bring back some engineering mindset in the design of societal governance, because we might just have been too busy making the internet to notice that the people in charge are no wiser than most of us; in fact they're pretty much the very type of human beings we usually don't listen to for serious matters —at least when we're on the 'good' timeline of humanity.