The question for America after the election (guest post)

What I've asked for some time:

"The question I keep asking myself is, assuming Obama wins, will right-wing Republicans understand it as a repudiation and as a result temper their vitriol and become more reasonable, or will they see it as a further provocation and become even more vituperative and extreme? I'd like the believe the former but I fear the latter.

The issues that divide us -- the size of government, the impact of large companies and Wall Street on our economy and democracy, whether women have a right to control their own bodies, for example -- are not new points of division. The first has been with us since the time of Jefferson and Hamilton; we've been arguing over the second since the late nineteenth century; the third has been a point of contention since Roe v. Wade. So why, now, have these divisions become so rancorous?

We were far more divided over Vietnam in the late 60s and early 70s, over civil rights in the 60s, and over communism in the 1950s, than we are over the current group of divisive issues -- and yet in those days we carried on a national dialogue of sorts. We watched the same things on television and believed the same arbiters of facts (Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite); we came across others in our communities and sometimes our own families who disagreed with us; we didn't have Fox News or Rush and his imitators. We hadn't split into blue states and red states.

The fundamental question, assuming Obama wins, is how and whether we can find common ground again?"

--Robert Reich, American political economist, professor, author, and political commentator. He served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and was Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997.

When, if ever, will we come back together as Americans, all of us, and work together to solve our problems?

Links: https://www.facebook.com/RBReich?ref=stream

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Reich