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tbh this post and parts of its replies almost deserve a minor mention in the 'ways smart people can be very confused' museum that hosts greats like Weininger, Hegel, and Berkeley. Hopefully miy reply doesn't!
Conflicts over categories aren't driven by the existence of categories, categories are just rough labels or ideas people have that are useful to their ends, and said categories pop up and conflicts occur over them over those nebulous, fractal, and contingent ends. Republicans aren't republicans because they're polarizing around R vs D, they are so because of the atoms hitting other atoms, which at our scale occurs in thousands of different rough patterns, some of which are 'reacting to increases in crime and homelessness', 'noticing many surrounding them are failing relative to traditional religious morality', etc. Given that complexity, it's difficult to make any claims about the way such conflicts unfold that don't reference said underlying causes at all.
Not really sure what you're arguing tbh, but I think a direct refutation of it is that (and this comes from the intuition that these 'poles' are more casual terms than they are fundamental) of two poles, often one just wins. Organized christian religious institutions as a political force behind history lost to democratic, modern politics. Horse-drawn carriages for practical transportation lost to cars, swords lost to guns, etc. There's no root causes in conflict between 'poles', just the laws of physics and the complexities of human interests and contingencies acting through them.
I don't think you're disagreeing with me, I'm talking about human nature and you're talking about technology. The fundamental tensions I'm talking about map onto these technological, social and political issues and innovations in unpredictable ways.
Politics may have defeated Christianity, but that wasn't a fundamental tension, politics and religion coexisted for millenia before, and will again. The tension there would be between the moralistic and materialistic human urges. So politics defeats a religion, but it becomes a religion in the process, thereby maintaining the duality. Even atheists need a god and a heaven, even if god is the president and heaven is "gay luxury space communism". This is the tension that destroys materialistic politics, it's why communism never worked and became a cult. It just couldn't get over the god-shaped hole. Politically, this tension gets generalized as "church and state", and it is generally understood today that separating the two is better for both. Render unto the one pole the things that are Caesar's and to the other, the things that are God's.
At sufficient levels of abstraction, some good advice.
Many more than this, I think. My point, somewhat garbled perhaps, is not that any group has some eternal essence, much the opposite. We all have the same conflicts within us, these are so numerous and interact in such complex ways that there's no predicting how they'll map onto the future. But if one digs into an issue long enough and defines the terms carefully enough, the basic tensions usually present themselves quickly.
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