Still, on an instinctual level, I’d go you one step further and call these people (the Donderos, not my friends) batshit crazy fucking assholes. But since they’re obviously suffering from some form of mental illness, I’ll leave instinct out of it and just call them batshit crazy. Calling them fucking assholes is temporarily satisfying, but one would just run into those exasperating social constructs you discussed.

On the whole, these cultural divides and the type of insanity displayed by people like Dondero, Boortz and Limbaugh has existed as long as we’ve existed (a pattern of human behavior you alluded to in “Anti-Semitism: the Ur-Hatred”). It’s just that now, thanks to the advent of modern communication and the internet, gobs of this noxious material is more readily available than ever before in human history. And taking the very long term view, whether this exposure helps or hinders our evolution remains to be seen. It’s obviously hindering conservatives at present, but I fear they’ll evolve (we are fighting human nature after all). However, as best we can, I think we’ll evolve too to deal with them.