I think we've lost something in our collective civic toolkit since Tocqueville called the US a nation of joiners. Now, instead of spending an evening or two a week at Rotary, the Elks, PTA, Farm Bureau or whatever other civic organization that allied us with like-minded people who might not completely agree with every hair-brained idea we might have, forcing us to get used to, and maybe even like, compromise in the civic sphere, we go home and turn on HBO or 24 or some other form of passive entertainment. I'm not even going to get into the decline of churches organized on principles of congregational polity and the ascendency of mega churches with autocrat pastors, some who are even founding hereditary bishoprics.
On HBO we watch a movie where the hero is virtuous, ideologically pure, and oppressed by his enemies. And that hero ultimately wins by keeping to his pure ideals and utterly destroying his enemies. Or we play a video or online game where we get to imagine our own virtue and destroy as many of our enemies as we have skill enough to shoot, blow up, or beat to a bloody pulp.
No wonder we no longer see our political opponents as fellow citizens, misguided though they may be. Instead we have enemies, political enemies who want destroy our (and that 'our' does not include those political evil-doers) nation for their own horrible purposes. Political opponents are no longer well meaning; they no longer have our common best interests at heart even though their methods and policies are not as effective or just as our policies; people who disagree with us now are evil. Those opponents want to sell their fellow citizens into slavery to the United Nations, Europe, China, multi-national corporations, or [insert your own favorite evil empire here]. Compromise with those enemies, of course, is defeat. Finding common purpose with those we disagree with is just one more step in destroying our divinely founded, yet not quite realized, utopia. That utopia has continued to be held at bay by people of ill will since its founding. We no longer have to work toward a more perfect union; we just need to destroy those that are keeping us from it.
Unless we can relearn the skill of compromise and until we can start seeing the large majority of our fellow citizens as people of good will even when we disagree with them, we won't be able to root out the corrupt among us who use our fear of each other's ideas as a tool to further their own power. I fear that unless we relearn compromise our democratic processes will become a near useless means of governing ourselves.