This means you're left with a broad-brush politics of generalities which ignores individuality, almost by definition, and it also a similarly absolute notion of 'equality' to the table.

I think the only way to untangle the knot is to split things differently - into a politics of relationship, where relationship tone defines the experience.

Both political and personal relationships live on a spectrum with exploitation and authoritarian abuse at one extreme and mutually beneficial consideration and symbiosis at the other.

The dynamics of authoritarian abuse are well understood - they rely on dogma more than reality, on strict power hierarchies maintained by psychological coercion and physical and emotional violence, and on the creation of a 'good' in-group and a 'bad' out-group.

What's not so understood is that just being 'progressive' doesn't make authoritarianism impossible. Altermeyer found that after fundamenalists, feminists were the next most authoritarian group in his study.

What's also not so understood, because it happens so rarely, is what consideration and symbiosis would look like if they were considered the most important core political value in every area of life.

We don't have any historical experience of a society which works like that, so it's difficult to imagine. And while it would be naive to pretend that aggression and dominance fights are going to disappear altogether, having symbiosis as a core moral foundation might go some way to making them less influential and destructive than they are today.