How should a two-party political system work?

[Indy Texas]

It's worth pointing out how large and all-encompassing World War II was. Everyone was either serving in the military or knew someone who was; the people who weren't were still rationing food and collecting scrap metal and all sorts of other things. I'd imagine the American people as a whole had a much greater esprit de corps as a result.

You had wealthy, well-connected people like George H. W. Bush enlisting and spending months of their lives living and working with people far below their socioeconomic stratus for their survival and the accomplishment of their goals. If George H. W. Bush was our age, he would have gone directly to Yale from high school and would probably be working for McKinsey or Goldman Sachs and wouldn't go anywhere near the armed forces. The Iraq War, for all intents and purposes, wasn't even happening for most Americans apart from a short feature on the news every now and then. Instead, that burden fell much more heavily on a much smaller segment of the population than with previous conflicts.

So it's not necessarily surprising that there's a blue collar guy in rural Kentucky who had one son go to Iraq and another go to Afghanistan and risk their lives to defend a country he's always been told is the greatest on Earth, only to have that country's government bail out a bunch of Yankee bankers and some of "those people" who were living too high on the hog, and then turn around and tell him that he has to buy a particular kind of health insurance.

Or that there's a blue state liberal who doesn't know a single person who has ever served in the military and doesn't understand why those stupid conservative rednecks have to be so obsessed with their guns.

I think if you took random Americans, separated them from their families, sent them to a hostile foreign country and told them they were responsible for coming back alive, and they were forced to depend on and trust people who weren't necessarily like them socially or culturally or politically, they'd probably have a much more respectful attitude when they returned.