@Pluto's Republic the creation of a "political spectrum" appears as mostly like a mask. Even if you were to conceive of the "Left" as the good guys, the "Right" is what? Men with curlicue mustaches who tie up young women to railroad tracks in front of onrushing trains? Syndicate leaders plotting world domination (with the aid of legions of obedient flunkies) from the safety of lairs inside extinct volcanoes? It's just another mask.

When the "Left" was into socialism, the "far-Right" called itself the "National Socialist" party or NSDAP, colloquially the Nazis. The "far-Right" today uses this "National Socialist" name to smear socialists with a false association with Nazis. The "Left" of today does not know what socialism is. Bernie Sanders calls social democracy "socialism," which might be good for now. At any rate, how can we promise something when we don't know what it is? It's much easier to create a mask.

And, no, I am not merely expressing my disdain for politics. Rather, once we tear off the political spectrum mask, real politics becomes more likely than it was with the mask on.

US culture, such as it is, produced a hybrid government that was never steeped in the juices of self awareness. Its national history was brief compared to the normal spectrum of governing evolution. The governed share no common ancestral memories of war lords and clans, emperors and kings that you will find in the Old World governments in the Eastern hemisphere. It is so mechanized and fragile that the People never once found the inner strength to revise or improve it as they were admonished to do every 20 years or so. Thus, it remains an artificial artifact that can be conveniently "translated" into modern law by those in power.

Thus, the US is a 'pop-up' nation with a do-it-yourself government designed by a privileged crew, who, had they been born in this era, would have surely been gamers.

The governing divide between commoners and nobility may be an historic example of a divided house, but I do believe that the two-sided political divide runs through all governments that endure, regardless of how many political parties they create. Humans cannot achieve their potential — or even survive long, for that matter — without the support of a society. And that fact creates the core division that runs through all governments: The self-determination of the individual versus the group-determination of the society that provides the platform for the individual's aspirations. The division is not always political, but when it is, it is defined as the Right and the Left, is it not?. On this scale, the extremes might be Sociopaths (Individual-Right) and Authoritarians (Society-Left).

I'm comfortable with that as an immutable paradigm.

The point of all that is to frame the context of the United State's Pop-Up government, which is entirely void of any natural, shared, social evolution that might have informed it. My hypothesis is that the synthetic and experimental compounding of the government doctrine — as well thought out as it was — distorted the natural development of the universal Right-Left divide (individual vs. society). In the case of the instant US government, there was a mutation (perhaps a cognitive mismatch because it was a genocide nation). The "Left" never fully emerged. Its wings were clipped and it never flew.

The Left has always been treated like a dangerous infection by the body politic. Some of the Left exists as a large cyst in the Democratic Party. Most of the Left is hidden in the unaffiliated mist.

We need to invent that party. Perhaps for inventing that party we will be tagged on the Left, but that won't be our fault.

I do agree. A Left must emerge in American politics to protect a society that is being suffocated by the Sociopaths, who have run amok with the nation's money and power. Despair is on the rise and trust in public institutions and the media is gone.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal between WWE crowds cheering violent spectacles in a ring and political rallies cheering on "leaders" promising violence.

Here's a rant supposedly explaining Trump's "success" as President, well, "success" for a President who lost the popular vote by a significant margin and whose approval ratings hover between 46 and 35 percent. This is supposed to illustrate how the "Right" thinks today. At any rate, the most telling part of this rant is as follows:

The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the ‘60's. To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale.. It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – the violent take-over of the universities – till today.

The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety.

At any rate, this is as pure an illustration of example-free prose as I can find anywhere. The idea of the "violent take-over of the universities" ceased to have meaning after 1971. And an example of pre-Bernie Sanders and pre-Donald Trump "Left" might have served the author's purposes too, had those purposes included argument.

This is what I mean by "cultish" opinion. It's not really opinion, but if you sign on, you can join the club. That appears to be its primary function. I bet the people who believe this stuff might also be persuaded to have real opinions, using real arguments, if anyone bothered.

@SancheLlewellyn is quite compatible with the elite consensus. Which doesn't make the "extreme Right" all that extreme, except that the elite consensus is itself an extreme thing, sticking with capitalism as Australia and Brazil burn, France goes into general strike, and half of South America is either in army lockdown (Bolivia) or megaprotest (Chile).

It's only when the "extreme Left" gets into Bernie territory that the elite consensus panics. Which is bizarre given that Bernie Sanders would in another era be a mainstream New Deal Democrat. Oh, and WE'RE the closed-minded bunch.

The problem comes when one realizes "the extreme left" does not exist as a political force in this country. Sure, you have anti-vaxxers, chem-trailers, and other fringe groups that might pass as radical "left" in a vacuum, but nowhere near the numbers of evangelical Überchristians that infest the far right. Just try telling one of them that their imaginary enemy (who resembles Lovecraft's creations more than anything) will not return in a bloody holocaust and rapture the good Überchristians up to--what they call Heaven but you wouldn't want to spend time there any more than in their mythical Hell (usually Dante's version).

On the left you may find someone who refused to go outside whenever Mercury turns retrograde, or refuses to drink with a plastic straw.

@Snode was in real-life defunct by 1973. Tim McVeigh, on the other hand, lived on to become that guy Stephen Paddock who killed 58 people from the window of a Las Vegas hotel two years ago. I'm trying to imagine these people in an alternate history in which the United States had, some decades ago, amended the Second Amendment to allow for Australian-style gun control.

there comes to mind a far left and a far right. I'm thinking of the Weather Underground and Tim McVeigh. While hey both believed in the wrongness of the government, the the Weather Underground phoned in warnings so people could evacuate, while McVeigh didn't care who he killed, including day care kids.