Here's what she wrote that brought us to the brink of enlightenment.
<blockquote>Some time ago I heard some conservatives on TV say the reason they are attracted to Obama is that while he's a liberal he "doesn't seem to hate us" In their view, all most liberals do is turn their venom on conservatives and criticize, tear apart any proposal they make, just because it was made by a conservative. I was shocked!! Truly shocked. Because that description sums up very neatly the problem I've always seen with conservatives: angry, nasty and negative about anything that is not of their own creation.</blockquote>

This shock she experienced is the brink of the enilghtenment Lefties need to change the face of America. Obama already is enlightened, at least to a much greater degree than we've seen in any national campaigner. His byword is to "disagree without being disagreeable," because he knows that being agreeable is a foremost precondition of negotiation. We just can not realize our goals by degrading the other side.

It's difficult to get the import of his prescription unless you also get what E2 came very close to discovering: that the backlash against both the 1960s upheavel and the ensuing Politcally Correct Movement is much more against the hostility and disparagement from the Left than has been realized. The policy differences may be less important than the tone of the disagreement, the sheer character assasinating quality of much of what the Left, as well as the Right, say. But there's another prior step that needs to be taken before seriously considering this proposition.

The problem that at least seems reprersented in E2's above quoted statement is the Left's and the Right's inability to realize that they are grossly degrading each other. Now it's time for one of my psychotherapy analogies. What you learn in some realms of marriage counseling is that, in most couple fights, neither party thinks that he or she is fighting. Both sides think they're just stating facts, as in the current attack against Obama. It doesn't seem like ridicule, much less hyperbolic ridicule, from the point of view of an ardent critic when he says that Obama has "shredded" the Constitution or that Obama's just playing politics. But it is. Likewise, when we call a Righty a "racist," it just seems like a fact rather than a psychologically brutal assault on the person's character. So it's no wonder that E2 would be shocked to discover that people on the right feel trashed by the Left. It's just human nature to fail to notice that you're trapped in a degrading war of words, especially when your substantive postions seems so very humane and correct. The other guy must be stupid or insane or racist or something worse if he can't see how wrong he is.

The Right has the same problem. Leaving out of this analysis for the moment the corrupt and the zealous, the ordinary Rightward folks I know don't realize that we're all caught in our mutual blindness to the often euphemisitc degradation that is forever sparking all around and in us. They trash us for being bleeding heart liberals, not realizing that they are, in so doing, directly implying a gross character assasination. They're implying that we are "stupid," "weak," and worse. They don't see that they're throwing gas on the embers of substantive disagreement.

Dig a little deeper and you see a more important problem, the tendency of all human beings to think in moralistic categories, which are intrinisically degrading. For instance, since Obama promised to oppose telecom immunity and then voted for the recent FISA bill, he must be duplicitous--a liar and/or just weak, lacking courage. Those are the degrading categories prevailing morality gives us. We don't have less degrading understandings of troubling behavior. We're not extensively empathic.

The tap root issue here in prevailing morality is that these moralistic categories are based on a conception of what goes on in the mind that no longer fits the facts of detailed analysis. Prevailing morality's categories are hopelessly reductionistic and oversimple. For one thing, they totally exclude complex reasoning, as in Obama's defense of his vote on FISA. Many of my friends on the Left said that, "What matters is what you do, not how you explain yourself." This is a hoary moralistic principle that makes little sense; consider a decision to vote anti-abortion--it's a complicate issue that is too easily reduced to being based on stupidity or narrowness of mind. Here's another problem. Rigid versions of morality disallow even a breath of compromise of one's principles in the name of a greater good; an inch of compromise equals a mile of weakness. That's what I see in arched critiques of Obama's FISA vote. There's a very thick bramblebush here that would require a book-length treatise.

I think it's useful enough for all but hte most theoretically inclined academics at this point to just say along with E2's hint that the issue of mutual degradation is much more determinative than we might think. But there's hope.

What's striking in marriage counseling is that, when you with intellectual credibility capture each partner's position, what seemed like an intractable conflict suddenly evaporates. Accurate empathy dissolves the truly difficult part of conflicts. That's what Obama offers us as a method for moving America toward a more progressive position. A bumper-sticker version might be, If We Can Develop Respect For Each Other, We Can Change the World. He's done that in his blog on FISA, perhaps not accurately and thoroughly enough, but he tried mightily to wrtie to his critics and express his respect for them and explain his disagreement. More is needed from him on this vote, but the metacommunication--credibly based respect is our strength--is worth tuning in to.