Columnist Dennis Prager thinks America is so polarized along ideological and social fault lines as to be eternally immiscible, and although he doesn’t say it so many words, he implies that it will all end in tears:

Right and the left do not want the same America. . . .

The left wants America to look as much like Western European countries as possible. The left wants Europe’s quasi-pacifism, cradle-to-grave socialism, egalitarianism and secularism in America. The right wants none of those values to dominate America. . . .

The left subscribes to the French Revolution, whose guiding principles were "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." The right subscribes to the American formula, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." The French/European notion of equality is not mentioned. The right rejects the French Revolution and does not hold Western Europe as a model. The left does. That alone makes right and left irreconcilable. . . .

It is difficult to disagree with Prager’s observations about the immense division between left and right, for it is in evidence almost daily. One thing he overlooks, however, is those people in the middle who don’t wholeheartedly subscribe to the ideology of the left or the right.

That group, it appears, never enters into the calculus. Perhaps unintentionally, Prager falls into the error of the false dilemma in thinking that there are only two directions to go in this cultural quagmire. Unfortunately, the vast crowd in the middle don’t seem to have any answers either. The West appears to have lost its ability to pursue the path of true liberty, and in fact dismisses it out of hand. What, then, is left for us?

Prager concludes his grim survey with a dose of truly spectacular pessimism:

. . . calls for a unity among Americans that transcends left and right are either naive or disingenuous. America will be united only when one of them prevails over the other.

Or until we recognize that the answer is not in politics at all.