Cognitive dissonance..............

Opinion polling shows how far cognitive dissonance on this point has progressed.  When asked, millions of people will say that the two parties are (a) so much alike as to be virtually indistinguishable, and (b) too much occupied in partisan warfare.  The two "perceptions" are not necessarily opposed:  party conflict could easily be more and more disagreement about less and less - what Sigmund Freud characterized in another context as "the narcissism of small differences."

-Christopher Hitchens, as excerpted from his Wilson Quarterly essay of Autumn, 2004, as found in this collection of essays