Polarizing wedge issues, how many are inherently left vs. right rather than arbitrary?
The whole left/right thing gets to be a bit silly. The real world is full of color, even the most well-meaning of philosophies can reduce it to mere shades of gray, and the dull-minded and rigid try to posterize that down to black and white.
At it's most basic, politics is a way of deciding who gets what and how. It's one step up from just bashing each other over the head with rocks to determine winners and losers. In any political system, the conservatives will be the ones happy with the status quo, those who are on top. The reformers will usually be the ones who feel they have a raw deal. And if soever fortunes are reversed, so, too, are the political leanings.
If we look at at the Stalinist take on communism or national socialism, we see philosophies that arose from what are considered opposite sides of the political spectrum but have arrived at the same end state. I doubt the interns of a stalag would find much to differentiate it form a gulag. A bullet in the back of the head from a communist's gun feels about the same as from a fascist's.
Here's one take on the political spectrum as circle rather than line. You go far enough to the left and far enough to the right, you end up meeting in an ugly place.
Given that our society is running with the left/right framing, any given issue is going to be placed in one camp or the other. It will either be championed by one side and so the opponents will naturally flock to the other or it will be campaigned against actively by a side and thus defenders will go to the opposite side.
Given that the GOP base is white, it's natural to pander to them and support racist policies. When the Democrats abandoned Jim Crow, the Republicans swooped in to take up the cause. It gained them a lot of support. Democrats never really seemed to want to embrace gay rights but gays knew they'd have no traction with the Republicans and so picked the lesser of two evils. With a lot of arm-twisting, they were able to make the Dems take up the cause. Funny thing, though, the libertarian side of the right thinks sexual orientation isn't anyone's business but they don't have a strong enough voice to affect the party's platform. It's an inherent contradiction in their base. Likewise, the religious types are crusading against pornography and self-declared cultural filth even as the billionaires who fund the party have made their fortunes off of those very products.
What kind of amuses me is that nannystate is usually a critique levied by the right against the left for what's seen as social engineering even as they are blind to their own efforts at social engineering, i.e. banning abortion. It's the same kind of cognitive dissonance that sees defending segregation as simply a matter of states' rights while the DEA stomping over legalized pot is perfectly fine.
So, what sorts of wedge issues do you think could have gone either way? Gay rights, for example, could never have been taken up by the GOP. Nutrition, healthy lifestyle, anti-GMO crusading, that well could have become a religious issue if things had gone differently. Corporations could well have turned to the Democrats to create political opposition. It's pretty easy to see how wholesome foods and healthy living could be packaged with the Christian message and become as strong of a culture war issue as sex and abortion.
Can you think of any other issues that could have gone differently just as easily?