> Americans view politics like sportsball, I.e "our team good everyone else bad"

it doesn't take a lot of effort to discover that plenty of power-structures and political regimes around the world aside from the United States eventually simplify down to basic adversarialism.

It goes from 'RED/BLUE' all the way to 'GreatLeader/Dictator', but the United States doesn't have 'us versus them' to ourselves.

That's politics everywhere. Politics is the nonviolent contestation of power and typically political parties cater to a set of specific people with peculiar interests and beliefs. Sometimes polarization splits people into two equally self-interested groups fighting a zero-sum game, but sometimes polarization is literally over good and evil, where one side wants to enslave, exterminate, or oppress people, or they want to exploit or invade other countries, or they want to neglect their poor, sick, or unfortunate neighbors, or they want to undermine the democratic intitutions to permanently ensconce themselves in power. Enlightened centrism is just intellectual sloth.