As an American, I am so over our government. The current rhetoric of no compromise and fuck over the other team as much as possible is so deeply frustrating that I wish we could scrap the whole thing and start over.

A few points:

1. Good strong imposition of the rules at the start, Teague. I started a Trump thread last year and it didn't take long until personal comments were made. Your rules are firm and fair.
2. If anyone wants some optimism, I'd like to refer them to Steven Pinker's ENLIGHTENMENT NOW book. He's one of the most intelligent public intellectuals about. There are plenty of his talks on youtube summarising his arguments. But in a sentence, the world has never been as good as it is now for a range of indicators: crime rates, war deaths, wealth, education, longevity, progressive laws, etc. As soon as you compare how things were like 50, 100, 500, 1000 years ago, today looks great!
3. I've been around long enough to see a few dozen elections in USA / UK / Australia so I've learned not to blame the politicians as it's the PEOPLE that keep voting for them. Any anger should be directed at the mechanisms by which people are "informed" by the media, school, entertainment, church, internet, university, etc. See Chomsky  for more on this point.
4. My own position is one of secularism, science education, environmentalism, aggressive fiscal redistribution (e.g. UBI), social libertarianism, and it feels like "my side" has been losing since the Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal revolution of the 1980s. Fox/Newscorp has poisoned the well of public debate and does an extremely effective job at it... e.g. to mobilize sick people to protest against improving their own healthcare, or to get poor people to advocate for tax cuts for billionaires is astonishing. I have a perverse "admiration" for how dirty the right can fight but it saddens me too. Had a Democrat done 1% of what Trump's said/done, there'd be hoards of pitchforks (and worse) on The Mall.
5. One of the issues I wrestle with is 'tolerance of intolerance'... anyone who's listened to Sam Harris will know how to unpack this. It's one of the paradoxes that the left must grapple with. I often agree and disagree simultaneously and still working through that issue.
6. But cheer up DiFers, as the big long picture over 50-100 years is indeed in the right direction. The good guys win in the end... I hope. If they don't, we'll all be outta here soon enough.

Take the specific example of 1M+ Syrian refugees taken into Europe. It's the highest ideal... fleeing a war-torn hellscape and seeking sanctuary and a new life in a modern safe prosperous free liberal western democracy. But invariably, there can be tensions, and if you take a side, you throw the other side under the bus.

Do unto others as you would like have done to yourself?
Do unto others as they would like?

There's a paradox with cosmopolitanism The full spectrum includes: (1) "you can't come in unless you sign up to our values", all the way to, "welcome, do what you want, knock yourself out"

When we visit Dubai, do we expect to hold hands on the beach? Or as guests, we must conform to local laws/customs, which means there are no universal human values we all share?

I'm still wrestling with this. But if you say you have an easy answer to it, I'd love to hear it.