Politics is the mind-killer; our opinions are largely formed on the basis of which tribes we want to affiliate with. What's more, when we first joined a tribe, we probably didn't properly vet the effects it would have on our cognition.
One illustration of this is the apparently contingent nature of actual political coalitions, and the prima facie plausibility of others. For example,
- In the real world, animal rights activists tend to be pro-choice.
- But animal rights & fetus rights seems just as plausible coalition - an expanding sphere of moral worth.
This suggests a de-biasing technique; inventing plausible alternative coalitions of ideas. When considering the counterfactual political argument, each side will have some red positions and some green positions, so hopefully your brain will be forced to evaluate it in a more rational manner.
Obviously, political issues are not all orthogonal; there is mutual information, and you don't want to ignore it. The idea isn't to decide your belief on every issue independently. If taxes on beer, cider and wine are a good idea, taxes on spirits are probably a good idea too. However, I think this is reflected in the "plausible coalitions" game; the most plausible reason I could think of for the political divide to fall between these is lobbying on behalf of distilleries, suggesting that these form a natural cluster in policy-space.
In case the idea can be more clearly grokked by examples, I'll post some in the comments.
I'm not sure why this one seems included. Evangelical Protestants such as they existed in the 19th century were a major part of abolitionism. The only reason this doesn't completely work is that modern evangelicals as we understand them were different in many ways from the closest thing in the first half of the 19th century.
This does however seem like a potentially interesting idea overall. The animals-rights/pro-lfe example is particularly striking. Pro-life/pacifists might be another possibility.
One thing that is actually similar to this is how often people presume that coalitions in other countries line up in ways that match one's own. For example, one common misconception among Americans about Israeli politics is that the nationalist/Zionist sentiment is coming from the ultra-Orthodox(charedim), when in fact many of the charedim don't want a Jewish state at all and it is the moderate Orthodox who are strongly nationalist.
I think most young Catholics are pro-life and pacifists.