[Wrecked944]

Oddly enough, reading the OT forum for about the past year has only deepened my belief that the "left" and "right" are far more similar than anyone seems willing to acknowledge. Viewed from a distance (and I almost never participate in OT political debates - I am much more of a lurker), nearly all Americans seems to share the same fundemental values and goals. Pretty much everybody wants good schools, safe homes, economic prosperity, less crime, less war, clean water, lower taxes,basic freedoms, etc etc. Those things are so common that nobody even bothers to debate them. They are assumed. So from a distance, the "left" and "right" look like people who agree on 99% of everything and then fight like cats and dog over the remaining one percent -- sometimes even the most trivial one percent.

I suspect a lot of it is driven by political parties and cable TV - both entities whose very existence depends on conflict. They try to raise the volume level of the debate in order to mask the fact that most American politicians are amazingly similar and the difference between either party seems to be which interest groups they sell their souls to.