Polarization of Politics

To really understand how and why politics is polarized you have to go to the root of each of the mentalities, or the extreme of each, if you will. I am sure many will not agree with me on this, but it is how I see it.

The people who really consider themselves moderates these days are the ones who do not care much about politics and do not want to pick a side. This means you have to be careful because if you voice your opinions too strongly or too often you become and "extremist" or "crazy" and then people will just blow you off and not listen to you. If you never voice your opinions then what good is it having any? So there is a fine line you have to walk.

The people who are really into politics are usually clumped into one of two groups (later I will argue why there should be at least three groups). Commonly these groups are known as Republicans and Democrats. Now many people differ from the candidates of those parties in opinions so it is often hard to decide which to call yourself. I have found that the easiest is to take them to the extremes and see which extreme you like the best.

Democrats is the easiest, because many of them are open about it. The extreme liberal is a socialist or in the absolute extreme a communist. Now Republicans are a little harder but to me it would be a Theocracy (government run by the church). I believe this because their social policies (gay rights, abortion, etc...) resulted from a religious origin for the most part. Not to mention many want Christianity to be the US religion and want the 10 commandments taught in school.

So which of those do you like better? For a country comparison, would you rather live in USSR/China or Iran? To most of us neither sound good and indeed there are other factors, but you have to start somewhere.

Now I would argue there are other extremes, one I just want to touch on is a dictatorship or totalitarianism. This is usually an offshoot of one of the others, so I personally would lump it in with one of them most of the time, but I would not argue too much if others wanted to make it its own category.

So then I started lumping different movements into different categories and there was one movement that did not fit any of those 2/3. That is the smaller government, Libertarian movement. Now once again very few people want any of the extremes, but what would be the extreme to this movement? The final extreme that I think needs to be considered based on this one is anarchy. We have been raised to fear this word, just as religious people fear polytheism or atheism. But it is something to consider. Is no government really worse than a fully controlling government? Personally I don't think true anarchy would work or if it did, I don't think it would last, but it is an extreme none the less.

So I leave it to you, which extreme would you prefer if you had to pick and there were no other choices?
Totalitarianism, anarchy, theocracy, or socialism (communism)?