You may recall, from last November, the media talking about "values," which is the politically correct word for "Christian." Political correctness, by the way, is just another invention of the market in that political operative have become brand managers–they've carefully chosen the word "values" to mean something very specific. And yet, the word "values" is so broadly common as to make the claim to the word rather audacious.

There's a culture war (some might say 'culture wars') going on at all economic levels and in all corners of the country. It is a battle, literally, for the heart and soul of America, and everybody knows it. Perhaps you think I'm being dramatic, but consider what builds and sustains a nation–any nation. A shared history is one thing, but there are several other pillars involved; namely, a shared culture.

Think about America today–the two camps, which we have seen fit to call 'Red' and 'Blue'–are developing parallel cultural developments. Their own media outlets, movies, music, books and videos, and an array of targeted TV programming, and even a national Christian satelite provider named 'Sky Angel.' Look at the blogosphere: parallel (though sometimes overlapping) hemispheres of left and right.

The chief theorist of nationalism, Benedict Anderson talks about the invention of the printing press (and therefore mass media) as the catalyst for the creation of the democratic nation-state. In order to think of someone you've never met, never heard of, and will never interact with in your entire life as a 'fellow citizen' and pretend to bear them in mind when voting, you have to become part of what Anderson called the "imagined community." What builds the nation? Literature, in the age before television, and then radio, etc., but always, always mass media.

America, by the way, is the only country in the world where the government didn't install television broadcast equipment in order to foster a national culture. This is because some guy working in his garage invented it in Utah, so America being the land of the free and enterprising, we have the world's only private television broadcasting network, which is still regulated (poorly) by the government.

What I'm trying to get at here is that the two Americas are separating and forming their own national identities. We're basically split down the middle, and with the array of consumer choices in the cultural market, nationalism is on sale and you can pick which nation you want to be a part of. Will the Union ultimately survive this growing chasm? Should it? Will one America subsume the other, or can they get along?

Let's get back to values, because that's what this whole thing is about–this essay, this blog, politics, human interaction as a whole, take your pick. What drives me crazy about the appropriation of the word "values" is that everybody has 'values.' This is crucial to understanding the genesis of the two Americas, but more importantly, <b>why people who are just as smart as you are disagree about politics</b>.

Each of us contains within ourselves a base fear for the country and the government. For some people, it's the fear that the government will take their guns away. For some, it's that the government will herd minorities into slave and death camps, or that free speech will be abolished, or the gap between rich and poor will grow unsustainable. For some, it's that lazy indigents will get a free ride on their hard-earned tax dollars, or that millions of unborn babies will be killed yearly. And so forth; each has a nightmare scenario; for some people, they are living that nightmare.

These fears are installed early, and are the post powerful political motivators on the planet. The point about these fears is that they're not really rational, in that they are installed in us psychologically at a young age rather than the result of a bipartisan debate. As the descendent of Holocaust survivors, you can imagine my nightmare scenario for a democratic government–and these fears were practically inborn. Did you know there is an excellent chance that you have the same party affiliation your father had when you were 15? (In a smaller number of cases, your values may be the diametric opposite of those views, which is another version of the above).

The flipside of fears are hopes, and those hopes are called "values." Politically speaking, values are what each person considers inviolable principles. Everything else is a matter of expedience, really. In our two-party system, you vote for the lesser of two evils, so we choose the one who threatens our values the least.

We all have a base set of assumptions, which are rooted in our fears. We build our universes around them. I have long maintained that people are more alike than they are different, but I mean it in this very specific way. In "The Fog of War," McNamara talks about the importance of "empathizing with the enemy." It's a crucial step towards a real understanding of politics. Once you realize your enemy is much like yourself save for a different set of axioms, you can make progress, in either war, or peace. Everybody's built the same, just using different parts.

For example, if you value security (as many suburban GOP voters do), the administration has likely played upon your fears with great success (even while they do everything they can to destabilize the world and our military). Consider the demographic footprint of 'Red' and 'Blue'–note that the greatest targets (i.e., urban areas like New York and DC) for terrorist attacks are always 'Blue', while the least likely targets are mostly 'Red.' What's really interesting is that the same fears which motivated suburbanites and exurbanites or their ancestors to move away from the cities linger on in their consciousnesses. The people who were behind the wars were seldom real targets in their own right (which allowed them to be cavalier about sending troops to fight for our supposed values). We know they're behind the war because they're not in front of it; the war is a policy point that few Republicans outside of PNAC are really wedded to, but can easily support without it costing them anything.

Consider an issue like "states' rights." Unless you're the governor, the words "states' rights" are necessarily a canard, a mask for your real agenda. Notice how when a party is out of power they take up the states' rights banner as quickly as they put it down again when they return to office? It's not an accident. Very few people take the issue seriously, which is why the states' rights agenda is such a useful and flexible tool.

To identify someone's fear (as good political operatives are trained to do) you can use that fear as a fulcrum for your agenda, which in itself is mutable as long as it includes your base fear.