> are you perhaps viewing American politics from the perspective of someone accustomed to European politics?
I probably am. With the "golden calves" point, I meant that there are specific topics that are adhered to religiously, and any attempt to discuss them produces a reflexive negative reaction. I'm not even talking about extreme ideology, I'm talking about things like the Google memo, which, although it did have some points that didn't really stand (and which should have sparked discussion, as the memo intended), didn't merit the shitstorm that ensued, in my opinion.
I see this in various friends of mine, when we discuss, for example, hiring quotas. Personally, I generally consider hiring quotas a bad practice, and discussed this with a friend, who is heavily in favor of them. However, when I told him about how my sister got passed over for hiring in favor of a male competitor as a result of affirmative action (lawyers here are overwhelmingly female), I could sense that my friend didn't agree with it either. It felt like his opinion wasn't "minorities should have an advantage", but rather "this particular group of people should have an advantage even where they're the majority". That strikes me as a fundamentally non-rational position.
Another point is that I feel that if you're a white, middle-class male, you can basically never be right. If someone puts you down, you can't complain because there are other people who are less privileged than you. It's the "starving children in Africa" argument.
Take all this with a grain of salt, though, as the society I live in isn't like this. All of the above is what I gather from talking to my american friends and colleagues, so I may be off the mark or wrong in many things.