>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.