Small note: about 150m people voted for D or R. Out of almost 230m eligible voter pool, the rest just didn't vote.
I think it's fair to say that US Politics is framed as a binary choice (regardless of how you justify it) because that's the party system that is in place...along with the common winner-takes-all systems.
That's an excellent point. No third party has come anywhere close to the major levers of power in more than 150 years.
And first-past-the-post elections certainly contribute to that.
But that's orthogonal to my point. GP said:
"Americans have been trained to have a strictly binary, categorical view of issues instead of looking at each issue as something with its own set of properties to explore."
Note that GP doesn't address parties or elections. Rather they claim that Americans have a "binary, categorical view of issues."
That's to what I took exception. Many Americans have nuanced views of a variety of issues.
That said, the reality is that neither major party platform supports all the good ideas from across the ideological spectrum.
But, as you correctly pointed out, most people pick the party that they think gives them more of what they think is right.
That doesn't mean every (R || D) voter supports every (R || D) position. Nor does it mean that every (R || D) voter blindly accepts the talking points of their selected party.
Yes. There absolutely are voters who just vote their party without giving a thought to the policies advocated by that party. Sometimes because they're one-issue voters, sometimes because they, their extended families and communities have voted that way for generations, sometimes because they're too intellectually lazy to understand the issues and take the easy way out.
But to ascribe the above to all Americans (whether they voted or not -- GP talked about issues, not votes) is equally intellectually lazy.
Perhaps that's true of some (perhaps many) Americans, but certainly not all. Please don't paint 330 million individuals with the same broad brush. If for no other reason than you're doing exactly what (taking a binary, categorical view of a gigantic group instead of treating individuals as individuals) you're complaining about.
For me (as well as many other Americans), I recognize that context and nuance are important when considering most issues.
Assuming that tweets or political slogans represent the views of all (or even many) Americans is shallow indeed.
The devil (as well as the solutions) is always in the details, whether it be the minimum wage, broadband competition, healthcare or dozens of other issues.
Many people (myself included) are ignorant of the details surrounding a variety of issues unless it directly affects them.
However, many (if not most) have a nuanced understanding of issues (at all levels of government) that impact them.
The nationalization of party politics (helped along quite a bit by the decline and disappearance of much of the local journalism in the US) creates least-common-denominator messaging that ignores any nuance or context whatsoever.
As for Assange, it's not a left/right dichotomy at all.
In fact, many who generally vote (D) are among Assange's biggest supporters, and many who generally vote (R) are among his biggest detractors.
IMNSHO, it has much more to do with whether or not you believe that Assange can get a fair trial in a US Federal court.
There are dozens (50 state court systems, many more municipal/county/territorial court systems) of other courts in the US, but the Federal court system is generally among the fairest of US court systems. Especially if there's a lot of publicity surrounding a particular case -- as there is here.
And Assange will be tried in Federal court.
The man himself doesn't think so, or he wouldn't have cloistered himself in the Ecuadorian embassy for seven years.
Given that no journalist has ever been convicted under the 1917 Espionage Act[0], under which the really serious charges against Assange was indicted, it seems unlikely in the extreme that he'd be convicted of those charges.
The charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act[1] do not carry heavy sentences, nor (at least as I understand it) is the evidence of violations of that law very strong.
As such, it's quite likely that if Assange hadn't jumped bail and hidden out in the Ecuadorian embassy, all this would have been over and he'd have been banging Swedish girls again for at least a few years.
As someone who generally votes (D), I'd like to see Assange acquitted and let him move on.
His credibility has suffered mightily, but most of that (IMHO) was a result of his own actions and statements (Seth Rich? Really?).
Regardless, you're flat wrong about Americans as mindless morons parroting their particular party line. Sure there are some who do so, but certainly not all (or even most).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act_of_1917
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
Edit: Added referenced links.