You're welcome.

Though I think the colors we need to understand, long before the particular binary of American politics, is black and white.

We have a deep cultural assumption that good and bad are some cosmic duel, between the forces of rightousness and evil, but they are the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. The 1/0 of sentience. What's good for the fox, is bad for the chicken.

When we see good as aspirational, rather than elemental, the only alternative is bad. So all the higher order nuance, subjectivity and complexity is suspect in the race to the bottom, of our side versus the Other.

Then when we make it political, everything on our side must be good and everything about the other side must be bad.

Yet any society that ever existed has those enforcing and supporting the cultural forms and norms and those pushing against the boundaries they see as inhibiting their growth. It's like motor and steering. The head and heart. Desires and judgements.

So when it becomes the basis for what is becoming civil conflict, only those most emotionally driven and least logical will be at the forefront of both sides.

Given this belief in good as God goes to the heart of our religious systems, it is difficult to examine, but the fact remains that after a hundred thousand years of going forth and multiplying, we've reached the edge of the global petri dish and it's time to seriously reflect on our situation.

For example, the foundational story of Western culture, that of Adam, Eve and the apple, points out that knowledge is a double edged sword, yet there is little appreciation for that today. Anyone questioning progress and science is a Luddite and a deplorable.

Though it really wasn't Enlightment that finally deposed monarchy, so much as it was our ability to wage total warfare.

Today we literally have Dr. Frankenstein himself telling us to be very afraid of the monster and people wonder why science seems to lose its allure.

I suspect that when this fire finally burns out, the United States will be broken, much like the Soviet Union, but without a core state and nation, with thousands of years of history to fall back on. Just this shattered dream of our own specialness and infallibility.