Between conservatives and progressives, indeed.
Is America Hopelessly Divided?
...Progressive scholars for decades have claimed that liberal democracy by its very nature seeks to bring peace and reason to societies facing moral and intellectual disagreement. But no society can survive if its people cannot achieve general consensus on certain fundamental understandings regarding the nature of the person and of society itself. Moreover, while we do not have open war, it seems clear that America is divided between two groups operating on two sets of fundamentally hostile preconceptions. On one side are those who see America as a fundamentally decent country founded on moral principles and dedicated to protecting religiously-grounded communities. On the other are those who see our nation as fatally flawed and in need of replacement by a new society devoted to radically different principles, replacing traditional norms and institutions with an abstract code valuing the pursuit of individual interests and pleasures and using the state to achieve substantive “justice,” defined in terms of perceived grievances. Moreover, one party in this struggle has declared itself opposed to principles of civility and decorum, even in public deliberative bodies such as the U.S. Senate, seeing its enemies as unworthy of toleration, its goals as mandatory and holy, and its tactics as intrinsically justified, however much damage they may do to persons, processes, political structures, and personal lives....
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Originally Posted by Chris
