Because we haven't had a civil war in the past fourteen decades, people think we can't have one now. Where is the geographic clarity of the Mason-Dixon line? When you look at the red-state blue-state division in the past few elections, you get a false impression. The real division is urban, academic, and high-tech counties versus suburban, rural, and conservative Christian counties. How could such widely scattered "blue" centers and such centerless "red" populations ever act in concert?
Geography aside, however, we have never been so evenly divided with such hateful rhetoric since the years leading up to the Civil War of the 1860s. Because the national media elite are so uniformly progressive, we keep hearing (in the elite media) about the rhetorical excesses of the "extreme right." To hear the same media, there is no "extreme left," just the occasional progressive who says things he or she shouldn't.
The article continues here:
Keeping Things Civil - Afterword to the novel Empire by Orson Scott Card
What I wanted to point out (especially for those of you who aren't form the U.S.) is that red and blue states are a myth. It really is urban versus rural. Note that I'm speaking in generalizations. Cincinnati Ohio always goes right wing and tiny little Yellow Springs out in rural Ohio is a bastion of hippie liberalism.
The conflict of urban versus rural is as old as cities, but the podcaster is right. It has gotten nasty lately... especially on social issues like gay marriage and abortion. The right has convinced itself that it has a god-given right to ban things it doesn't agree with. It's not good enough to simply choose not to buy rocky road ice cream; if you're a conservative, you have to get the ice cream vendor to stop selling it and villify those who eat it. "You eat rocky road!? You're a disgusting person."
The left (whack jobs aside) has been trying to wage a war of "leave me the hell alone so long as it's not hurting you" which is ironic because (up until recently) this had been the mantra of conservatives.
At the basis of the conservative view is the idea that the majority can dictate laws and policies to the minority. Liberals have become the opposite: the majority should respect the wishes of the minority. Considering our Constitution (Bill of Rights) is meant to protect the individual from the government, I find the conservative stance untenable and unAmerican. Saying, "I believe in freedom and my god given right to tell you how to live your life" isn't what the Fathers had in mind.