> my support for this change assumes that this Supreme Court will show restraint towards political activism (in either direction) in general. Call it naive, but I'll wait and see.

That is naive, given that we've already seen over the past several years that this has already been shown to be true. When the GOP is in power, new justices are appointed solely based on political appointment. Their qualifications as judges seem to be irrelevant, as long as they support the party platform. When the GOP controls the Senate, they invent "rules" around which president gets to earn confirmation, and then break their own "rules" when it suits them.

> The same state rights that allow gun control [...] to be locally legalized before national concensus

Look again: SCOTUS is getting more brazen in overturning state gun control laws. This is just a consequence of what I've said above: the politically-appointed justices loudly cry "states' rights!" when it suits their platform, and quietly ignore state sovereignty when it suits them. Consider also that the GOP has been even more loudly talking about legislation for a nationwide abortion ban. Same playbook: claim the removal of a federal law is a victory for states' rights, but then turn around and try to enact the opposite law at the federal level in order to block the states from making their own choice.

> Now, the rural republican votes counting for more in the senate is a huge issue and threat to democracy that the US needs to figure out if it ever wants to represent the views of the people.

This is the key issue. The US government will never reflect the will of the people as long as the Senate is composed as it is. Procedural garbage like the filibuster make the body even more ineffective and useless. My prediction here is that as soon as the GOP regains control of the Senate, once they get another taste of obstruction, they'll hypocritically kill the filibuster, despite all their current rhetoric around how it's essential to the Senate.

> The jaded side of me says: vote in more moderates that are willing to strike compromises.

The issue here is that what you are calling "hyperprogressive activists" are not really all that "hyper" anything when you consider the rest of the democratic world. A US "moderate" would be considered fairly conservative in many other Western democracies. When I talk to friends who are members of various minority groups about this, they dismiss more "center-left" candidates immediately: none of these candidates have the courage (or desire) to work on civil rights and equality.

I absolutely agree with you that political polarization is at an all-time high, and most far-left/right politicians seem to be more interested in stoking outrage and provoking their opponents than in actually creating positive outcomes.

I don't really know what the solution is. It's hard to just tell everyone, en masse, to just calm the fuck down and stop assuming anyone on the other side of the aisle is an evil demon who wants to destroy the others' way of life. I'm guilty of this sometimes myself, but I'm really trying to understand where some of these people are coming from. It's hard. It's really hard.

> In the long run, history will have a dim view of this era of global polarization with all political sides to blame.

I understand the sentiment here, and what drives it, but I think it's bad to ignore that there are differences between how the two sides act. They're both terrible, and have many terrible policy platforms, but I think it's worth considering that one party seems more interested in taking people's rights and equal treatment away (or denying "new" rights that should have been rights all along) than the other.