The dirty secret that is always a wrecking ball to this vision of politics-on-a-spectrum is that information and misinformation can and often do tend to exist along predictably polarized lines. Are you a "conservative" if you were rightly skeptical of some aspects of left-wing environmentalism (e.g. plastics recycling, hype about hydrogen cars) or about George W. Bush supposedly stealing Ohio in 2004, or about apologetically revisionist interpretations of China's human rights abuses? Are you liberal if you think Joe Biden was the rightful winner in 2020 or that global warming is real?
Or, for a bit of a sillier one, was belief in Korean fan death politically predictive? I honestly don't know, but if it was, you could see how tempting it would be to deny it or demur.
Those individual issues are not the same of course, on a number of levels. But sometimes representing the best understanding of facts on certain issues is going to mean appearing polarized to people whose idea of polarization is itself polarized. Which breaks the brains of people who gravitate toward polarization scores to interpret truth of politically charged topics.
Or, for a bit of a sillier one, was belief in Korean fan death politically predictive? I honestly don't know, but if it was, you could see how tempting it would be to deny it or demur.
Those individual issues are not the same of course, on a number of levels. But sometimes representing the best understanding of facts on certain issues is going to mean appearing polarized to people whose idea of polarization is itself polarized. Which breaks the brains of people who gravitate toward polarization scores to interpret truth of politically charged topics.