As soon as we lose respect for the complexity of other people, it's suddenly easy to dehumanize them. That's how polarization, which may be the poison of the age, sinks its first roots. [...] Above all else, your foe is a person like you so you treat him as you would wish to be treated yourself. There's some "rule" along those lines. But it's easy to forget.
Indeed, it was evident in the recent campaign and, indeed, in most political commentary in recent years, that this poison has become ubiquitous. Not only people, but ideas are viewed in the simplest terms. That was part of Kerry's problem, certainly. Consulting with the UN became, for example, in the hands of Republican propagandists and the minds of voters opposed to him, simply handing our foreign policy over to the French and the rest of the Security Council. But the Democrats did the same thing, as FactCheck.org and SpinSanity.com made clear. Democratic voters were no less simplistic in their view of Republican positions than their Republican cousins. (And both sides got issues affecting the Federal budget grievously wrong; more about that later--in the meantime, see Peter G. Peterson, Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004]).
The truth is, that there is virtue on both sides, in both the people and the ideas they expound. Politics in a democracy is a dialectic, where any outcome, in elections, in policy, combines elements from all sides. A monistic democracy, where outcomes are the pure incarnation of one side or the other, cannot last.
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