It is adding incendiary meaning. You are assuming the intent of someone else not wanting politics in the workplace. You assume it means that they are content with the status quo and would like to maintain that.

The reality is that many people keep politics out of the workplace because they dislike the amount that bringing politics to the workplace can affect the cohesion of their team/department.

You're creating a strawman argument.

You clearly value the change that can be brought by bringing politics into the workplace. That's totally cool, your value system is different than that of some other people. All they're asking is that you take their viewpoint without assigning your assumed reasons to it.

There is a distinction I'm being exceedingly careful to make between intent and effect.

The meaning may be absolutely as you describe. The effect, however, is to perpetuate gradients in power, privilege, and control.

There are multitudes of venues for political expression, why cannot the workplace be a refuge from that maelstrom?

That sounds like a political thesis, not a workplace. Who said anything about status quo? How does a lack of discussion mean agreement with a position you assumed but was never stated? Do you see how people don't like this?

You can challenge all you want, but being an annoyance in the office by forcing your views and interpretations on everyone is a major issue. I don't care about your politics and don't want to discuss mine. The company is paying you for productivity, not political change. Understanding boundaries is the first step to communicating with people.

If we work together, you should assume good faith. We are all on the same team at work. That's the point.

Wouldn't an assumption of good faith presume a capacity for frank discussion?

Oddly enough, I'm debating (on Mastodon) against the notion that a Single Global Authority defined as "suitably free", supported through taxes, would be a prefered / acceptable alternative to present private Internet service provisioning.

I agree with most of the sentiment, particularly public subsidy of comms capabilities. The concern is that it's not possibly to simply define a thing as "suitably free", you've got to work in a real world, in which definitions don't simply instantiate themselves, in which adversaries may take control of critical regulatory bodies (I pointed out that One Geopolitical Party with interests Significantly Opposed to Another has in recent history held the chair of the UN Human Rights Commission, where the UN was the proposed Internet provisioning entity).

Similarly: you can't simply declare by definition or fiat that we're all on the same team. For multiple parties' interests to be fairly represented and addressed, there must be some mechanism for representing and addressing those concerns.

Otherwise the proposal simply ignores existing realities and complexities and attempts to abstract them out of existence. They'll reappear in time in other places or forms.

Additionally, my understaning of "presume good faith" may be different from yours. It's not so much a belief I'll maintain, most especially in the absence of evidence. It's an operating and communications modality I will attempt to sustain (and hope others do), up to the point at which it is clearly no longer tenable. It's an extension of all feasible grace and credit, to the point that no possible justification for that extension remains.

Andreas Schou, a Googler, used to have an excellent guide to moderation pinned to his profile page there. A copy survives here:

https://www.voidstar.com/Takeout/ActivityLog/Comments.html

I've posted it, with paragraph breaks to Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/raw/W3vpntgM

No, we're not. I'm not on your side just because we work for the same company. I'm not even on the company's side.

I'm on my side, first and last and always. If cooperation helps me, so be it. But if cooperation harms me, then I will speak up. If I am not heard, I will leave.

That is my inherent and sovereign right as a human being.

Bringing these issues to the workplace you risk finding more than you want to know about your coworkers. Will you still be able to be professional and unbiased in your relationships at work if you find out what opinions your coworkers have about political issues you care about? Probably not, so who wins in that case? Nobody, you lose as your motivation drops, company loses as productivity drops.

It's the same argument as not wanting to find everything there is to know about your neighbor, a dose of ignorance is healthy to maintaining most relationships in life. You don't need nor is it healthy, to apply the same standard of knowledge to your coworkers as to your significant other.