Racing to Extremes
It seems as though polarization occurs in part because of our inability to detail with ambiguity. When faced with ambiguity, such as this war, there is a time of sorting out, of shifting, and if you lean to one side and are attacked for it (even called 'immoral') then you tend to not only continue to lean to that side but to race to the fringe of that side - to embrace it as a moral good though before you merely saw it as a necessary evil. I've felt this tendency in myself by moving from the idea of self-defense to Iraqi liberation & back again (revolutions must be internal, at least in the beginning).
I'm making no moral equivalency, but remember the issue w/r/to the Southern states? By the 1830s, the morality of slavery was ambiguous at best. The Virginia legislature met to decide if slavery should be abolished in that state, and the vote was close. But that ambiguity did not last; abolitionists demonized Southerns and by the 1850s slavery was no longer seen as ambiguous morally, but as an actual moral good as described by John Calhoun & others.
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