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I think the idea is more that the conflict over that problem creates far more day-to-day strife and personal animus than value differences do, in line with Scott's memorable post about people's shocking ability to get along even when they have, on paper, deep and irreconcilable value differences.
Somehow, I sort-of agree and mostly disagree with both of you.
First off, the vast majority of people believe what they're told to believe. The source can vary (based mostly on historically contingent details) but it's external nature does not.
So, when @FCfromSSC talks about tribes and irreconcilable differences, it feels rather silly to me. There are no tribes, just some really loud megaphones (currently mostly in the media) and a lot of people dancing to their tune. Change the megaphones and the people will follow, both red and blue.
And Secondly, the conflict isn't about some specific problem. It's not even about any specific values. It's about power! Ambitious unscrupulous person A needs a weapon against political opponent B. What is he to do?! In our current system, the answer is to accuse the person of some moral failing. If this exact same person was to be dropped into a corporation, they would play dumb office politics games (and maybe hopefully differentiate themselves through commercial achievements). If they were dropped into China? They'd sing the praises of the party and complain about how their opponents were letting the party down.
And ambitious people are simply a fact of life. With a few scruples and the right incentives, they can be quite beneficial! But not when their incentives are to shit on the moral commons in the pursuit of power.
The root problem here is democracy. It weakens central authority and makes power a free-for-all. The net results is that politics infects everything downstream (and everything is downstream of the sovereign).
@FCfromSSC, get rid of the blue tribe and you will find the red tribe splitting at the seams. And you won't like the results.
@WandererintheWilderness, get rid of this problem and another will be found in its place.
It is evident that Blue Tribe had uncontested control of a supermajority of the "megaphone" for a very long time, and now this control is almost entirely gone. If there are only megaphones and people dancing to their tune, how did this occur?
At a minimum, your account of the political process is missing the concept of policy starvation.
I understand that values-coherence is not maintainable in the long term. The nation long divided will unite, the nation long-united will divide. All works of the human mind and hand decay eventually. The fact remains that some of them decay like stone, and some decay like nitroglycerin.
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