"Polarization" is not, in fact, the "the single greatest weakness of the United States as a country today." I am so sick to death of this sentiment. Fukuyama and guys like him love systems, they love tinkering, they love efficiency, they love "getting stuff done". Never mind the unspoken ideology of the middle, never mind what we're actually trying to achieve has a distinct ideological identity, we're political engineers, here! We're just trying to fix the system! It's almost like they're optimizing for bill passage rate.

I reject the idea that technical moderates are the default, that they're non-ideological, and that a watery combination of left and right ideas is best because it appeals to the most people, if only because we've been doing exactly that since the 80s and it's gotten us here.