Ben smith picked up this snippet today from First Read:

A polarized electorate: NBC/WSJ pollster Peter Hart (D) passes along this finding from a recent poll he conducted: 37% of McCain voters say they detest Obama and would have a hard time accepting him as president, while a similar number of Obama voters (36%) say the same thing of McCain.

Smith’s comment is “Whoever wins, doesn’t look like we’re in for a new era of good will.”

And speaking of ill will, I’ve been trying to sort out Leon Wieseltier’s antipathy for Louis Menand, most recently displayed in the current New Republic. Wieseltier takes Menand to task for several crimes against right thought (and Lionel Trilling) in this week’s column. Here’s a little of it:

what really rattles Menand is Trilling’s magnitude. In his conception of the intellectual life, Trilling was big. Menand is the professor of littleness. He is a man in flight from the seriousness of his own vocation.

It turns out that Wieseltier is using Menand’s recent New Yorker essay on Trilling as a reason for continuing an attack on Menand that goes back some years, at least to 2003 when Wieseltier accused Menand of impure thinking about George Orwell. Here’s a site that reviews some of this, though a few links are out of date.

So — the culture wars aren’t over. Whatever change we’re engaged in runs deep and generates powerful antipathies. I guess I’ve written a bit about that already, but it’s beginning to seem to me (even though there’s no longer a real academic debate about it) that vituperation like Wieseltier’s against a fellow humanist is maybe an index of something deeper than disagreement. I’m going to think about this and write some more after a bit.