Just because political matters are liable to be controversial discussion topics that may attract hotheads on both (or on all) sides of the debate, doesn't mean that the Official Definition of politics inherently includes tribalism. People just aren't versed in the art of steering political discussions towards productive outcomes, and that comes with experience, a good starting intelligence, and a great deal of wisdom. It wouldn't be impossible, for example, to have a LW Sequence on collaborative debates and getting along with debate partners.
Besides, there's a difference between discussing politics and doing politics; only the latter is Dark-Artsy almost by necessity.
Remember the litany of Tarski: if the solution is True, I want to believe that the solution is Ture (my side is right). If the solution is not True, I want to believe that the solution is not True (my political opponent is right).
Solutions are not true or false. They are effective or ineffective ways of accomplishing certain goals, which can be argued to be more or less worthy of pursuing. So there are (at least) two sides to your faction being "right". Where you want to go, and how you intend to get there. That's a very schematic summary of political discussion; it gets a lot more complicated than that, when you introduce instrumental goals, agents part of the same polity but with only partially overlapping values etc.
They are effective or ineffective ways of accomplishing certain goal
I'll generalize it even further: there are more and less optimal ways of accomplishing a certain goal and what is "optimal" depends on what are you optimizing for and the weights you assign to different values that you trade off against each other.
In a recent poll, many LW members expressed interest in a separate website for rational discussion of political topics. The website has been created, but we need a group of volunteers to help us test it and calibrate its recommendation system (see below).
If you would like to help (by participating in one or two discussions and giving us your feedback) please sign up here.
About individual recommendation system
All internet forums face a choice between freedom of speech and quality of debate. In absence of censorship, constructive discussions can be easily disrupted by the inflow of the mind-killed which causes the more intelligent participants to leave or descend to the same level.
Preserving quality thus usually requires at least one of the following methods:
On the new website, we are going to experiment with a different method. In brief, the idea is to use an automated recommendation system which sorts content, raising the best comments to the top and (optionally) hiding the worst. The sorting is done based on the individual preferences, allowing each user to avoid what he or she (rather than moderators or anyone else) defines as low quality content. In this way we should be able to enhance quality without imposing limits on free speech.
UPDATE. The discussions are scheduled to start on May 1.