Do not hate, even hatred.
Nobody likes moderates.
Why would they like us? We are not to be depended upon. At any moment we may stray off the reservation, blathering on about how the other side has a good point and how we should compromise. And speaking of compromises, if there's a disgusting compromise to be made, you can guarantee that it will be moderates who can't wait to piss off both sides by making it. We are crappy cheerleaders: "Caution! Pragmatism! Go team, at least a little bit, for now!" I get why nobody likes us.
But I also get why you need us.
You need us because we are always going to ask you to try to see things from the other side's point of view, and you need to keep doing that. Because when you stop, when you give up even attempting to empathize, you start to see your political opponents not as your fellow Americans who may be horribly misguided about some things, but as the Other. Something less than us. And when you start to think of Republicans or Evangelical Christians or right-wing conservatives or whoever it is who has you so very, veyr pissed off, when you replace the human figures in your mind with a nebulous, malevolent mass, that is the beginning of hatred.
And the thing about haters is that they are all more alike than they are different. They hate the Foe and wish to see a titanic, all-encompassing struggle take place that will obliterate one side or the other: on this, zealots on both sides of every question agree. The original causes and goals that motivated either side are burned away by hatred of the Enemy, until the hatred is all that's left. That's what hatred does to people and to movements.
For evidence you need look no further than the modern GOP, a zombified husk of a once-respectable movement, whose first and last tenet is that liberals are wrong and should be made to suffer. Do not think that because we are currently the faction that is more right than wrong that we cannot travel down that road.
Now don't get me wrong here. Despite my avowed moderation, I consider the modern GOP and the conservative movement generally to be intellectually bankrupt, criminally incompetent, and teetering between crypto- and plain-old-fascistic. I am politically committed to their defeat and endorse any methods towards that end that aren't actually violent or criminal. But I'm not emotionally invested in hating Republicans or their supporters -- quite aside from the practical point that there are a lot of people who consider themselves attached to the Republicans and the Right who could be brought around to our side, hatred is wrong. No American political movement should hate Americans, period full stop.
Talk about politics? My favorite thing. Talk smack about Republican politicians? Let 'em have it, I love some good snark. But when things start to look like the Daily Kos Two Minutes' Hate, I bail out. I don't hate Republicans. I wish I could say I don't hate anybody, but I'm not that good of a person yet. But I don't hate large swaths of the country who checked a certain box on their voter registrations for reasons that presumably made sense to them, and I don't want to be part of a political movement that does.
We are one country. We are one people. Some of them might have forgotten, we mustn't.