We have a completely bifurcated ontology. Just as one minority sees their other group as being left behind, another sees their other-group as having a now-completely false consciousness. Imo, we are alien tribes to one another, and I look at western democracies and see the same separation that precedes litigating a divorce. I can score points on people I disagree with all day, but I don't bother because those points are worthless and not redeemable for anything good in the world.
To expand that analogy, most divorces try to start as reasonable, but once you are actually free of one another in the separation, it becomes a war for the previously shared resources and custody, enabled and inflamed by people who get paid out of the shared pot either way, and any courtesy or civility is leveraged back as weakness. These differences become so irreconcilable that we have evolved a completely parallel court system to handle it. The whole process of litigating a divorce is debasing and shameful for everyone involved, and almost nobody gets out with their basic human dignity intact. It's a useful analogy because everywhere I have seen it, it's a microcosm of war.
What does a good outcome look like? In time the hostilities cool to where it's no longer an animal fight for survival. Typically in a divorce, women get the home and the kids, and men get some freedom to start another family, and some limited opportunity via visitation to guide their kids and help them become fully actualized people. Generally, the women go on to find new supportive companions, and the men move on and rebuild as best they can. This analogy I think is very close to the culture war divide, where, if we take it any deeper, it becomes just as much of a quagmire as who's right and wrong in a family dissolution as it is for red/blue, but it's useful to abstract it out with an analogy so we can look seriously at what I foresee we are very likely to be confronted with.
To me, Romney is like the sensitive ponytailed new friend who starts hanging around under the pretext of helping, but he's just another vulture circling a struggling relationship looking to make vulnerable people dependent on him. The cultural divide in America has always existed, but it has only really become dangerous because of carpet bagging opportunists who don't believe in truth whispering in the ears of the primary parties. People presenting themselves as centerists are usually just fluid and unprincipled, and by inserting themselves between mostly stable complementary sides, and by dissolving edges and boundaries, they create new distance that puts themselves in the middle. It makes them manipulative and dishonest brokers.
I am not a centerist, because I think our political differences are complimentary and mutually moderating forces that truly build one other and benefit us all. The proposal I would make would be that we agree to recognize that America has made good lives and a society together, and this attracts interlopers who would like a piece of what you have built together, and they use some very appealing and seductive techniques to try to lever themselves between you. They appeal to our feelings of outrage, pride, envy, aggrievement, and shame, among others. It's a very old trick, and it works in the microcosm as well as in the macro.
I live in a country where politicians preach togetherness and unity but always with themselves in the middle, and mainly spend their efforts trying shame anyone who isn't interested in their meddling as illiberal, oppressive and revanchist. If only we were as intolerant of their sleaze as we have become of each other, there might be a way to hold this thing together. If not, it will be sad, but I think we all know how this goes.