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You might believe it is the responsibility of the state to protect the unborn, regardless of the burden that imposes upon a mother.
    These are real differences. And as we think about reform, each side is likely to think about these differences, and about whether the proposed reform is likely to make the objectives of one side easier or those of the other side harder.
    But even if we could find “an effective reform that a vast majority of us could agree upon,” there is still the impossibly difficult challenge of convincing different tribes to join a federation to push for its adoption. So entrenched is the business model of polarization that one can’t even describe the idea of talking across tribes without being called a traitor to one’s own.
    I know this personally, and I have the bruises to prove it. At a teach-in at Occupy K Street, I implored the Occupiers to invite Tea Partiers to sit down with them. “You may or may not like capitalism,” I told them, “but nobody likes ‘crony capitalism,’ and it is crony capitalism that has corrupted this system of government and given us the misregulation that led to the collapse on Wall Street.”
    Just after I said that, in a scene that could have been scripted in Hollywood, a man sitting in the front row raised his hand and said, “I was one of the original Tea Partiers, and today I run a site called AgainstCronyCapitalism.org . I can guarantee you that if you started talking about the corruption from crony capitalism, you’d have thousands of Tea Partiers down here joining with you in this fight.”
    I thought the argument was obvious, and that the next steps would happen almost automatically.
    They didn’t.
    Instead, soon after my speech, a sportswriter for the Nation, Dave Zirin, started tweeting about my speech and then writing about it on his blog. We should not, he instructed, be collaborating with the racists from the Tea Party. It was enough, apparently, for the movement to hang with its own.
     But here’s the puzzle: Someone in the Occupiers’ “We can’t talk to the ‘racists’ of the Tea Party” camp needs to explain to me how the Occupiers can speak for “the 99 percent,” once we subtract the 30 percent who call themselves supporters of the Tea Party or the 40 percent of Americans who call themselves conservatives. Zirin thinks these “numbers actually tell us very little about what ideas hold sway among the mass of people in the United States.” But are the Tea Partiers, or the conservatives, just confused?
    Zirin’s concern is important. It grows from a desire to build a “true movement.” Such substantive movements are built around shared ideals and shared values. The ideals of we on the Left are different from the ideals of them on the Right. And if a true substantive movement has to give up talk about its own different values or ideals, then it dies. We need to be able to defend universal health care, even though that isn’t something 99 percent agree upon. We need to argue for a progressive tax rate, even if most Americans don’t agree about just how progressive that rate should be. We need to constantly and vigorously remind America about the harms caused by racism and sexism and homophobia; about the plight of immigrants, whether “legal” or not; about the hopelessness of the poor in America—even if the vast majority of Americans wouldn’t put those concerns anywhere close to the top. We on the Left need to have our movement, to build and rally our team, for the inevitable fight over the substantive policies that government will enact—whether or not we achieve fundamental reform.
    And so too on the Right. Tea Partiers and others from the Right want a smaller government. They need to rally their troops against all sorts of do-gooders (like me) who have all sorts of new ideas about how to spend tax dollars. They need to keep their troops in line, and, perhaps more important, they need to avoid alienating their members by