The politicization of society is damaging liberal democracy

One could develop mechanisms, that make the ability to compromise and negotiate outcomes, a requisite to holding offices, even after elections. This could for example happen, by the small minority parties (who are usually filtered out in most democracies) negotiating the voices they represent to another party that will enter representation, in return for representing a certain view-point.

This would prevent votes from being lost and would make the ability to compromise and "secure" these votes more important then populist behavior.

I don't think it's normal people pushing the polarization, at least not in the root cause analysis. The political parties are playing the meta-political game of continuing to exist and the game theory there is to slice and dice the electorate along advantageous lines in every voting district/region. The more divisive an issue, the more predictable and reliable as a tool for staying in power.

Political parties have no external goals; they are self-interested and use the people within them to achieve that goal by offering carrots (which result in fulfilling the external values of normal people) or sticks (which punish defection or opposing party members).

Progressivism and conservativism are not opposed on a single axis. Political parties lay claim to and label particular issues which benefits both major U.S. parties in the long run by giving them each a grab bag of issues for a particular set of voters. This is why, for example, guns and wombs have opposite signs in the personal-freedom axis for both parties. As long as the shared belief exists that an issue "belongs" to "one side" it remains useful as a political tool but nearly worthless as a policy tool for normal people.

Finally, it is not the extremes leading this charge. The core DNC and RNC execute this strategy because they are locked in a struggle for survival. The DNC and RNC have successfully used the threat of the least-aligned party to trap moderate and progressive voters within the party structures. Non-partisan primaries and ranked-choice/runoff voting are starting to show moderate success (AK and NH) at changing the game theory to favor politicians who compromise on multivariate issues versus enforcing party platforms.

There are plenty of voters who are registered independent/unaffiliated, but most of them still lean strongly toward one of the major parties. The number of consistent swing/split voters is much smaller. Most analysis/commentary I've seen says that partisan differences in turnout are a much bigger factor in winning elections than appealing to the center.

Sorry, but this article is 90% word salad and the other 10% seems to be saying things that most people would disagree with but in the most indirect language possible.

I'm not against using precise words when they are helpful. But sometimes I see people using complex language to obfuscate the message instead of clarifying it, and as far as I can tell that's what is happening here.

When the meaning of an essay is confused and unclear, either a) I'm just not smart enough to understand it or b) the author is a poor communicator. B is much, much more common.

This is just the "enlightened centrism" theory I think. There's no inherent virtue in neutrality between abstract issues. And acknowledging uncertainty or being flexible to reevaluation doesn't necessarily lead you to neutrality either.

You're also trying to frame it so that anyone who does consistently choose a side is inherently an extremist, and that these two extremes are "liberal" and "conservative."

The idea that political extremes are more similar to each other than to a moderate position is called horseshoe theory, and it has very little support among political scientists. It doesn't even apply in this case because, again, the two "sides" in american politics aren't even opposite extremes. In most peer countries the democrats would be solidly center-right and the republicans are off to their right. On the far left is a gaping hole where communists, anarcho-syndicalists, revolutionary socialists etc would be.

In practice people who call themselves moderate are usually consistently aligned with one of the two major parties, they just don't want to incur the social costs of that alignment in at least one context. Or and relatedly, they want to present themselves as being morally and intellectually superior to both, too "enlightened" to be duped into taking sides like inferior thinkers.

There's nothing wrong with understanding yourself and your world well enough to pick a side on an issue, or find allies for it. Again the self-questioning you describe isn't unique to centrists nor the reason for their centrism.

My positions are extreme, as are those of many of my friends and associates. We doubt too. Yet we find that we must act anyway, and risk being wrong or foolish.