Ends and means
We need to distinguish between disagreements over principles and goals, versus disagreements over strategy and tactics for achieving these goals. I suspect that there is much more agreement about basic principles, and less agreement about application of these principles to particular issues. And still less agreement about strategy and tactics. People may fall into different categories with respect to attitude toward risk, willingness to compromise, and patience, which may lead to differing willingness to support various policies or candidates.
Inherited views
One factor greatly influencing people's views is their family backgrounds. Most people tend to take positions similar to those of their parents (tho there are many exceptions who, for better or worse, take different paths). Once on a certain political path, perhaps due to family factors, people tend to stay there, since they usually listen to and talk to, and read material produced by, people with views similar to their own.
The mass media mess
Another basic problem is a lack of high quality, publicly available information about, and intelligent public discussions of, controversial issues. The most common sources of information on current events and politics are TV and, to a lesser extent, print media. Both are almost aways badly biased, mainly serving the interests of the very small, wealthy minority who control them. There are few, if any, intellectually honest commentators on TV. The print media are almost as bad. On the internet there are some decent commentators and sources of information (along with a lot of nonsense). So most people are ill informed, and insufficiently exposed to sensible arguments in the realm of politics.
Problems with our election systems
The difficulty in getting decent people elected is further exacerbated by three characteristics of our election system. One is the increasingly dominant role of money. Without access to large sums of money, victory in any meaningful election, is seldom achievable [6]. This is one of the ways in which the wealthy exert grossly disproportionate influence.
Another problem is the traditional plurality voting scheme, whereby each voter chooses one candidate, and the winner is the one receiving the most votes, This is very simple, and sounds reasonable. Until one considers carefully what can happen when there are more than two candidates. Sadly, a major reform effort has focussed on instant run-off voting [7], which, tho it looks good on the surface, is actually even worse than plurality voting. Fortunately there are good solutions, in the form of score (also called range) voting [8], and approval voting (the simplest form of score voting) [9]. Un fortunately, these methods have, thus far, not been used in significant American political elections.
A third problem with our system is the widespread use of sophisticated voting machines, i.e., e-voting. As compared with reasonably well run elections in which votes are manually cast on paper and tabulated manually, e-voting is subject both to failures due to error and machine malfunction, and, even more important, to sophisticated fraud that may be almost impossible to detect [10].
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