I wouldn't have thought it controversial to observe that our governance and politics are unusually, almost singularly, dysfunctional these days. Which logically means that we were doing it better in the past. Something that both memory and written history confirm--throughout much of American history, and especially in most of the postwar period up until recently, the government managed to function and "compromise" was not equated with surrender to Satan.

To return to Rob's analogy with computer operating systems, I think there's value in studying how each OS works with the goal of restoring interoperability. This article at Salon, The Tea Party’s paranoid aesthetic, seems like a fair assessment of the state of the rightwing mind these days. And it reminded me of Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, of which I'd heard but not yet gotten around to reading. Which oversight has now been corrected and I'm reading it now. More on that as it ferments.

It seems to infuriate rightwingers when I attempt to understand them. Not sure why that is, exactly, except for the recursive observation that maybe it's part of that "paranoid style". But Rob's on the right track to observe that we have different mental architectures, left and right, and so I'm not deterred by rightwing outrage at the inquiry. Not that I've ever been deterred before, of course.