Almost every time I read about US politics, I am struck by how polarized and conflict-oriented everything is. Most issues get dumbed down to an overly simplified position of two fundamentally irreconcilable extremes: yes or no, black or white, lovers or haters, north or south, urban or rural, us or them. Even the political scale from left to right tends to be mostly about left or right, which is strange, and it obviously doesn't work that way in practice. The two dominant parties have a wide spectrum of people from left to right, with some overlap, which is obvious from the attempts at rallying the GOP behind the health care bill. Creating a replacement bill for Obamacare that goes down well with both the most liberal and the most conservative Republicans in the House proved a very difficult task.
For almost every conflict, there is at least a scale between two extremes, where a lot of people tend to be more towards the middle and shift a little back and forth over time, rather than stick to one extreme. Furthermore, most issues are not one-dimensional and cannot be plotted on a simple scale like "from left to right". There are no simple answers to complicated questions, and the debate would benefit from admitting that.
This problem certainly isn't unique to the Unites States, but it seems to be particularly pronounced there.
(Disclosure: I'm Swedish, and Swedes are probably the most conflict-averse people in the world. But, hey, not picking fights has worked out extremely well for us for the past few centuries.)
