I'll preface this by saying a huge chunk of what I'm about to write is not my own thoughts or ideas. Most of it was taken from listening to Dogma Debate, a secular radio podcast hosted by David Smalley . I've also gotten some information from reading blogs and interacting with people in the comments section of those articles. Some of this is my own observation, but mostly my intent here is to summarize countless hours of radio shows and pages of blogs into my own words so you don't have to do the work yourself. All that said, I'm flashing back to the 2004 election, one that saw the incumbent George W. Bush run against John Kerry. I was in college at the time, and I remember describing myself as "an extreme democrat," or "very liberal." Social media wasn't what it is nowadays, back then, so if the country was as divided then as it is now, it certainly wasn't obvious to me. I felt pretty strongly, at that time, that hardly anybody could b