We are at war. You can pretend we can be one country again, but we can't.

[Igel]

59. Yeah, that's what I heard.

True cooperation means doing what I want and working with me to achieve the only reasonable goals--mine. That's compromise. Anything else is, well, arrogant.

It pays to remember that Reagan and the Religious Right that helped put him in power were a *reaction.*

Once you figure out the answer to the question, "A reaction to what?" then you have the proper response to the OP's question. Until you know what the action and the reaction are, you can't really do much in analyzing the forces at play.

Ultimately the dispute resolves into a number of different kinds of disputes (you have to think fairly abstractly for some of them--they surface in all sorts of different ways), and the disputes go back many generations. What's happened is that the sheer amount of self-righteousness and smugness of privilege ramped up rather significantly when I was a kid as a result of prosperity. Since then self-righteousness has routinely been confused with rightness, and critical thinking with being critical.