h/t to George Bernard Shaw. Republicans and Democrats may be more different than you think. Sure, we are different political parties, reflecting many philosophical differences about policy. But the parties are becoming increasingly made up of people who, on many subjects, no longer even speak the same dialect of Engish. Needless to say, this doesn't make communicating across the aisle any easier.
An obvious example of this popped out from this morning's Elections Morning Digest where David Nir took note of some outside advertising in the Kentucky Senate race:
The Kentucky Opportunity Coalition has two spots out (here and here). The first ad ties Democrat Alison Grimes to Obama and to interests described as "anti-coal." The second praises Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell for working to get rid of the estate tax (which the narrator, like pretty much every Republican, calls the "death tax").
Congress, once upon a time, created a Federal Estate Tax. That is what a Democrat would call it because we are more of a reality based community and more likely to call things what they actually are. But Republicans don't like accuracy, or much care for reality for that matter. Republicans have a problem with the use of the word "estate". Everybody in the 1% has an estate. Most people, in any meaningful sense, do not.
If you ask your browser to find images searching on the word, estate, this sort of thing will top the results.
Most people simply aren't going to find anything to identify with in a policy of protecting estates from taxes. Death, on the other hand, happens to everybody. So, never mind that the vast majority of American deaths have no implications whatsoever for Federal Estate Tax purposes, "death tax" replaces "estate tax" in the Republican lexicon.
Other examples abound. To ourselves, we are the Democratic Party. There are actual official papers that say that is who we are. We have the legal right to name ourselves, no less than Monsanto or General Mills, and we did. But over there, we are the Democrat Party. We call it unconstitutional suppression of reproductive freedom; they all it celebrating life. We call ourselves progressive; they call us socialist. They call it homeland security; we call it a militarized police state.
Go ahead. Cite your own examples in the comments. There are plenty. GOP isolation within their narrowly proscribed misinformation bubble has not just fractured our politics. It has created two tribes whose languages seem to be evolving away from one another.