Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think part of the issue is that politics appears to have become something akin to a national sport, where we elect to support team A or team B. Because it is similar to a sport, our hopes and dreams, our entire being is drawn into this particular identity. That is why if team A supports position C ( that happened to be supported by team B previously ) it becomes a valid position. I do not know how to make people di…
Sports and politics can both give people an easy feeling of belonging to something greater than themselves. Both can give you addictive neur-ochemical rushes while interweaving the experience of victory and defeat with tribal identification and othering. I used to have a condescending attitude towards people who took sports 'way too seriously', but now I wonder if it is a net gain for society to give people a compara…
Tribalism in America goes deep, and you're right: rooting for a sports team is fairly harmless, and rooting for a political party is probably harmful, but I'd argue it's not nearly as harmful as as rooting blindly for an ideology. If you want your party to succeed, you should be engaged in your local politics, talk to people from the other side, listen honestly to their concerns, be willing to change your own opinion on specific policies, and push for those sensible policy changes to be adopted as part of your local party's platform. That's how you win people over, that's how you win elections, and how you enact real change that affects people's lives. Anything else is just yelling into your echo chamber, or getting into bar fights with the guys wearing the "wrong" jerseys.
Ideologies form the axes of socioeconomic space, they're not an ideal point, and the push toward an "us versus them" mentality in politics is embarrassing. It's a quirk that's arisen out of new media, an easily exploitable bug, and the sooner people see through the bullshit and we outgrow this, the better.