@Burt Likko
You write as though you have determined that the primary sin, the sin of sins, is “Othering.” So, of course, you have to turn your back on politics, since the defining political distinction or the distinction that defines politics remains “us” and “them,” “friend” and “enemy,” collective “self” and “other.”
The left-liberal notion is that politics is about “policy” for the good of all – “all people created equal” and so on – but no left-liberal [or any other] politics is able to address the good of all immediately, or to whatever extent it might it passes over into the apolitical or politically irrelevant: Even the further left Bernie Sanders is a protectionist, appealing to the narrowly defined self-interest of the victims of globalization (i.e., universalized economic liberalism), suppressing the extent to which benefit to “us” along such lines must come at cost to and against the evident will of unidentified “thems,” while the anti-othering social justice movement pursues a program of othering the otherers (mostly as “hating/fearing conservatives”), dividing the world up into those to whom such a paradox expresses the highest purposes and those to whom it demonstrates hypocrisy or lack of self-awareness.
As for the intellectual foundations of “conservatism” and the foundations or potential foundations of a “conservative” governing coalition, they are not necessarily the same thing, and reaching a shared understanding of the relationship (broadly, between theory and practice) will itself entail a complex discussion in which public narratives and sincerely and widely held presumptions may or may not diverge from sensible explanations, with the divergences thought to reflect on participants in different ways, with every possibly significant position factually and morally contestable, and with everyone determined to short circuit the process in a way that, more often than not unless invariably, will just happen to replicate the same self-interested friend-enemy distinctions (under whatever name) with which they began: Every other re-othered, just like we like it.
From: How to Fix a Broken Elephant: Prologue | Ordinary Times
). Go to our 
Would you say that, based on your interpretation of “the political” as inherently othering, and the related view that it cannot thus inherently be bad to do so, the more realistic hope (maybe the only one) is to restrain such impulses? That is, to keep that Other sentiment from leading to oppression and slaughter?