No matter who wins next Tuesday’s election, the political and cultural rift in the United States that started after World War II has widened and deepened so profoundly as to be almost unbridgeable.

The rift I’m talking about is often stunningly apparent but difficult to define. Lately, it’s taken shape in the verbal thunder of the presidential election and the animosity it has spawned. But the rift is more than political.

It has become personal to millions and millions of people on both sides of the chasm, so personal that they won’t talk to one another and certainly won’t listen to one another. The rift is symbolized in the term “un-American,” and its variant “real American.” It’s gone so far in Albuquerque that one right-wing political pundit called the 45,000 person Obama rally at the University of New Mexico Saturday a “cult” and “un-American.”

Does that mean, in his mind, that 45,000 people in Albuquerque are somehow traitors?

America has been riven by a basic conflict over the power of government since before the writing of the Constitution. And it’s always had its deep divides -– attempting to balance the seemingly contrary concepts of freedom and equality, or the sentiments of “live and let live” versus “it’s mine and you can’t have it.” The rift has always been risky and deep between what is considered private property and public property in America.

But the cultural divide that has caused the most damage arises around the word un-American. It is an almost unforgivable accusation to throw at those you merely disagree with and amounts to the kind of stupid and inflammatory exaggeration that ruins relationships and wrecks any climate of consensus.

The rift becomes too deep, the insult too egregious.

I don’t know how a president can even approach healing the ire, trauma, and potential danger that such a rift is causing now. But if anyone has a chance, it’s Barack Obama. I say this knowing that I am sure to have many disagreements with his policies. I am always concerned that Democrats slide too easily these days into being docile centrists when strong action is needed.

But Sen. Obama’s campaign has refused to get into the gutter with hate mongers, neo-McCarthyites and race baiters. His personal demeanor of calm and expansive fair-mindedness, gives me some hope that America’s cultural chasm might become at least narrow enough to talk across from time to time.

The chasm doesn’t have to do with religion, with abortion, with immigration, with taxes, the economy, with racism, or sexism, with war, with guns, or with the environment. Being labeled un-American by so-called real Americans transcends such issues while entangling them in the snags and bogs of political filth. The difference between un-Americans” and real Americans –- or, to call it like it is, between liberals and conservatives –- creates a scapegoat, demonizes an opponent, stimulates dark inner feelings of rage, and creates whole classes of people to whom one does not talk, does not extend the courtesy of dialogue, does not treat as a respected equal.

It’s the same for people on both sides of the divide. They are pariahs to each other, the accused detest the accusers, and so on and so on. This split has become a pervasive reality in the American psyche, but one the corporate media never mentions.

It’s much more than just taking sides. Labeling people un-American and real American is a uniquely conservative vice. Conservatives have an array of scapegoats and demons -– “hateful liberals,” “socialists,” gays, “aliens,” “feminazis,” “Godless communists” (a term some of them throw around with arch abandon), and even environmentalists whom they call “eco-terrorists.” Such accusations, coupled with the Bush Administration’s dismantling of constitutional privacy protections, have caused some people on the left to use epithets of their own, like Nazi and Fascist. And that’s got to stop too.

Conservatives, of course, reserve the label real American only for themselves. It’s a kind of obnoxious and toxic political branding that make hardened enemies of mere opponents. The post-war McCarthy Era, and the accompanying age of HUAC (House UnAmerican Activities Committee) created rifts in our culture that have never fully healed.

Yes, there were Soviet spies in the United States and, yes, they did steal the secrets of the bomb, and yes we were in a cold war. But while McCarthyism disguised itself in anti-Soviet counter-espionage, its underlying motive was to turn nonconservatives into un-Americans and dismiss them from the political discourse. It was the beginning of a symbolic civil war, with conservatives and their southern strategy inflaming still smoldering confederate passions into extolling themselves as “real” and the rest of us as “un.”

I wonder how the 45,000 Americans who cheered for Sen. Obama here would react if someone accused them to their faces of being unpatriotic?

I’m sure I already know how many of them feel. Maybe a President Obama, with his cool headed reserve and pragmatic tactics -– i.e. tactics that work -– will be able to deal with both parties in Congress.

But that won’t be enough.

He’s got to find a way to defuse the antagonism across the great divide in America’s political culture. I’m at a loss, however, to say just how he could do it. Though his sense of decency will make a good start.