The following article touches on some key maladies in American culture:

<a href="http://www.policyreview.org/oct05/rosen.html>narcissism

In the American political environment it might be helpful to view all of the participants as authors. Then a thought of Saul Bellow becomes appropriate:

A novel "becomes art when views most opposite to the author's own are allowed to exist in full strength. Without this a novel of ideas is mere self-indulgence, and didacticism is simply axe-grinding. Opposites must be free to range themselves against each other, and they must be passionately expressed on both sides." { Bakhtin, M.M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Trans. and Ed. Caryl Emerson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. (146) }