Call it holocaust, lynching, or apartheid -- whatever the atrocity, it always begins with language that privileges us, dehumanizes them, and somehow justifies their removal from our midst. The right has scored some very specific and tangible (and otherwise politically untenable) benefits by the simple act of grinding our discourse down the point where it's now mostly conduced in the coarsest of us-versus-them terms. Somehow, we need to find our way back to each other.

Jeremiah Wright is everywhere this week -- and the media doesn't quite know what to make of it. Mostly, they're stuck so hard in the election horse-race narrative that they only question they can think to ask is: Does having Wright out there hurt Obama, or help him?

One of the trickiest parts of dealing with the extremist right is figuring out whether a given group is just harmless garden-variety crazy -- or harboring the special kind of insanity that will lead to acts of local violence or outright domestic terror.

The GI has rewarded veterans for their service by giving them the foundations on which to build a comfortable and successful civilian life. But the Cons have apparently abandoned that noble goal. it's not hard at all to imagine a scenario in which this new relationship to our military creates far-flung changes that may undermine the stability of our democracy.

Jeremiah Wright is everywhere this week -- and the media doesn't quite know what to make of it. Mostly, they're stuck so hard in the election horse-race narrative that they only question they can think to ask is: Does having Wright out there hurt Obama, or help him?

One of the trickiest parts of dealing with the extremist right is figuring out whether a given group is just harmless garden-variety crazy -- or harboring the special kind of insanity that will lead to acts of local violence or outright domestic terror.

The GI has rewarded veterans for their service by giving them the foundations on which to build a comfortable and successful civilian life. But the Cons have apparently abandoned that noble goal. it's not hard at all to imagine a scenario in which this new relationship to our military creates far-flung changes that may undermine the stability of our democracy.

When we reckon the toll of the conservatives' reckless "culture war" on America, we can no longer deny that the their inbred compulsion to create and fight external demons has weakened us militarily, economically, environmentally and culturally. Our survival depends on finding an alternative. Fortunately, there is one.

The premise is preposterously obvious and simple -- but all the more powerful for being so. Where people -- from families to nations -- see themselves as one unified group, where everyone's in the same boat together rowing toward a more-or-less agreed-upon future shore, and where there's enough mutual trust and respect to allow people to cooperate in achieving their common goals, the group tends to survive and thrive.

Can we progressives -- who won't be caught dead these days calling ourselves liberals -- can we stop serving as a punching bag for the right?

The battle we are fighting is not a political war, but is—as the conservatives told us right out loud from the beginning—an all-out culture war. And the only way to win it is to reach beyond politics and offer our own vision of cultural transformation. This morning, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama showed us precisely how this is done.

Part I
Part II