Think Lani Guinier. Conservatives and liberals take a fundamentally different approach to politics. Liberals inhabit a world painted a thousand shades of gray. Conservatives believe they are battling evil.
Liberals believe they are struggling to overcome human frailties.
We have seen the enemy, the liberal President advised in that speech, and he is us. Tolerance is the watchword for liberals. Punishment is the watchword for conservatives. In 1980, when the nation's overworked air-traffic controllers went on strike, President Reagan fired every last one. Ten years later, after the union had been broken and a trickle of unemployed controllers came hat in hand to apply for jobs, President Bush refused to hire them.