Maybe Mr. Sunstein can cite equivalent liberal phenomena to the Swiftboaters or the GOP conventioneers sporting their cute little purple bandaids.

Or Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Michelle Malkin or Ann Coulter.

Or Bush v. Gore.

Or the events described in "Blinded by the Right," and "The Hunting of the President" and the numerous exposes of the Bush II regime.

Note to Mr. Sunstein: Opposition to dangerous radicals (based on ruinous economic damage, loss of liberty and literal death and destruction) does not make one a dangerous radical.

Why is the Salon audience far more knowledgable and perceptive then half of the blockheads you feature? I got this "civility" crap from the Inquirer and the DNC liberals that staff it (although they ARE good people), highlighting **Leiberman** as a casualty of this "rabid polarization".

Josh Marshall said it best (paraphrasing) when he moved from a centrist to a more emboldened stance, that to claim the need for civility and dialogue when the other guy is basically coming at you with a knife was to be a chump.

Its not that the Democrats are too partisan, they're NOT PARTISAN ENOUGH in fighting against what has emerged as a neo fascist ethic from the right.

I'm all willing to dialogue with someone who makes sense, Krstoff has written good articles on this in the Times, but conservatives are so driven by power needs, this idea of common ground is virtually useless. And if the author knew his history, he would be well aware that since the post WWII period, it has been the right with their first poster boy, Nixon, who have ramped up this division to accumulate and maintain power in this country.

Americans have been involved in this kind of stuff since the beginning of the Republic. They used to circulate "scurrilous" pamphlets. How do you think Hamilton and Burr ended up in a duel?

Please spare us from these whiners who recreate history and contemporary events in their own insipid fantasy.

Here is another case, which happens often on Salon, in which the letters posted make a more compelling argument than the article itself. Also happens whenever Camille Paglia shows up.

My own opinion: I celebrate this blog as a shining example of the spirited discourse the Founding Fathers had in mind. The internet is bringing us to the town meeting, without leaving the house.

I don't buy Sunstein's thesis; sure, the political atmosphere has become more polarized, but whose fault is that, truly? Time and again, the mainstream media decries "partisanship" when really it's the Right who pursue a "my way or the highway" road to what they call compromise, and if the "Left" (since we have no actual Left represented in power in this country) resists, it's howled that they're playing politics and being partisan. Sunstein even admits that the Right does it better than the Left. No, the Right is waging culture war on democracy, certainly not the "Left." It's been what they've been doing.

Do so-called leftists troll as aggressively on conservative sites as conservatives and reactionaries troll on liberal sites? It seems to me that liberals hunker down defensively in their various online enclaves and conservative trolls run in and bang their clubs, trying to derail discussion and shout down thought. Any liberal site out there will be beset by right wingdings, so who is doing the polarizing? The Right are convinced that they are right, and that's that -- the only thing is to destroy the enemy, and their political language is all about that, and has been for many decades. While liberals navelgaze and play devil's advocate and wonder why we can't all get along, the Right puts the boot in, again and again.

There's a difference between forming a gang and forming a tribe, I think -- the tribe kind of wants to be left alone, while the gang wants to punish anybody not in the gang; the tribe accepts what they have in common, while the gang opposes those outside of the gang. Since the "turf" is politics, the Right aggressively goes after what they see as "wrongthink" while the "Left" just wants to be able to think and talk in peace.

The Right found a winning formula in that aggressive "You are wrong, end of story." approach, and their rank-and-file haven't abandoned it, to say nothing of most of their leaders. The "Left" responded by tacking rightward, so now the majority of "leftist" American opinion is actually politically centrist, with a tiny few actually left of center, and marginalized.

But even that's too much for the Right, who'll go after anybody who isn't part of the gang. If we had an actual Left in this country, there'd probably be street fights, instead of simpering flamewars. But then our government worked very hard to kill nascent left-wing movements in this country, so maybe we're just seeing a toxic bloom in the hothouse of American politics, because of the lack of diversity in political opinion among those with actual power.

I'd be happy if so-called conservatives in this country were actually conservative, because I think they'd have a stake in a stable society; the trouble is, they're not, and we're paying for it as a country.

Like many other readers, I have found no convincing argument why it should be the Internet that is making us stupid. Cass describes a phenomenon known to most students of social psychology at a time when there was no Internet around. Still, I found the Boulder/Colorado Springs experiments and his observations on judges quite interesting variations to the plethora of empirical evidence already gathered. And the statistical analyses on bloggers certainly are a new aspect. Yet, there is little in this interview that would even bolster a Plan B of the thesis, i.e. that the internet in some way would aggravate the tendency for polarizing that I really think is going on.

Forty years ago, I used to get a kick out of listening to a telephone program called "Let Freedom Ring" because it seemed so nutty. Meanwhile, freedom rings all around on the airwaves in the US and in the cyberspace.

Forty years ago, you could truly find liberal Republicans in Congress, and Republicans would support equal pay for women against the opposition of liberals! For us Europeans, the insistence on bi-partisanship in the US always seemed somewhat strange, blurring the lines of political argumentation - and if you have seen how British MP George Galloway took up Senator Norm Coleman a couple of years ago you know what I mean. Polarizations then in the US were far more common within parties: just remember the 1964 Goldwaterite reception of Nelson Rockefeller at the San Francisco Republican Convention or the infamous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Yeah, I know, that’s when the Internet got started ....

Cass mentions Kennedy’s comment on the Bay of Pigs but your president learnt his lesson: During the Cuba crisis he had people fighting out opposing views. I do suspect that Clinton’s taking in of David Gergen into the White House had amongst others the reason to hear out opposing views. After all, Slick Willie was (and still is) the Master of Triangulation, the exact opposite of polarization! Pity the incumbent wants nothing of that.

I am still getting a kick out of reading NewsMax, National Review and so on, but is a somewhat scary kick. I confess, when I had the opportunity to see and hear, I could not bear a certain Fair and Balanced View. Not because people there hold an opposing view but because there is so little rational argument to be found. Thus, instead of making me think about my position they only enhance it. I very much like to listen to people like McCain or Huckabee who at least from time to time use some thoughtful arguments - not to speak of people like the late Milton Friedman or other conservative thinkers who at least think they have to use reason in an argument. And while civility certainly is lacking – and that is a pity in itself! – the lack of argument is even more frightening. Yes, there is an Attack on Reason going on, unfortunately not only in your country. Scary enough that the not so long ago dominant position in US politics wants to roll back every aspect of the Great Society, New Frontier, Fair Deal, and New Deal: they now want to even revert the very basis of the American Democracy, Enlightenment. And that all is the Internet’s fault?

Augo Knoke

Hamburg, Germany