Just goes to show you how insidious partisanship is. It's clearly not about liberty or policy principals, but rather whatever solution one party puts forward, the other has no choice but to oppose it.

One of my favorite pet daydreams is trying to figure out a way of abolishing political parties altogether...

It's a nice dream, but I would settle for having more than 2 political parties. Then at least we could break out of the "are you with Us or are you with Them" dichotomy.

> Just goes to show insidious partisanship is

I think this is the wrong take away. The corona debate in Sweden is pretty healthy. Not very partisan and neither side has dug their heels in.

It's interesting why this isn't the case in the US, too. Conservatives in the US are much older, and the people in the at-risk age groups are disproportionately Republican. Yet they oppose the lockdown. Liberals, who are the ones being laid off and bearing the economic brunt of the lockdown while being at much lower risk to their own health support it.

Evolutionary you can see a case for having society members of both keeping culture and changing culture at the same time.

Roughly Conservatives don't like change (lockdown) Liberals like change (lockdown)

I don't think so. Everyone is in agreement over broad strokes of no-lockdown. Different parties just disagree on the details of how to execute that strategy. Some leftwing party: "Why did we have so many precariously employed temp-workers in retirement homes? Of course they will spread the disease the disease, and they don't care complain about health code violations". Some rightwing party: "Why was there insufficient national coordination? Of course districts can't do this on their own" Some other rightwing party "Person X handled this incompetently and should be fired".