[WS:} I am not sure if I agree with this. Yes, "we" disagree on some values or goals, but we may agree on others. The same can be said of people on "our" side of the barricade. One thing that I learned in my comparative cross national work is to avoid "pars pro toto" thinking i.e. interpreting differences in some aspects as differences in all aspects. A typical example of this was conventional portrayal of the xUSSR - since this was a nominally a "Communist" country, everything in that country had to be a reflection of "Communism" and every failure (or success if you were on the opposite side) attributed to this salient feature. This way of thinking not only obscured a lot of similarities among countries - but it also produced a caricature of reality in which ideological differences were the main focus and everything else merged into the background or ignored.
The same principle applies to people as well. First of all, people are not consistent - they may be "liberal" on some issues in one context but "conservative" on the same issue in a different context. It goes without say that they may be "liberal" on one issue but "conservative" on another. Cognitive scientists call it framing - which is basically an "apriori" way of interpreting events, deciding what is is important what is not, what goes together, what should be treated as separate, etc. The problem is that people's attitudes and behaviors are interpreted through frames that emphasize certain differences and de-emphasize of ignore everything else. A big part of it is the nature of the American political discourse that portrays everything in black and white terms: liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, with us or against us, friend or foe etc.
However, if one abandons these distorting interpretative frames, one may discover that people assigned to different camps by the political propaganda may in fact have more in common than ideologues thinks.
One more observation - one of the features of the United States that outsiders tend to find most objectionable is the style of political discourse - full of bombast, ridiculously simplistic statements, and fire-and-brimstone rhetoric. It is not that it does not exist elsewhere, but it is on a periphery rather in the center of the political discourse. And if it moves to the center (cf. Berlusconi) it becomes national embarrassment. That perhaps may explain why the outside world hated Bush but likes Obama, event though both pursue similar foreign policies. Here, the opposite seems to be true - if a politician tries to be civil (cf. Obama) he becomes embarrassment to his party.
But in any case, avoiding the trap of the "American political discourse" is what guides much of mu political thinking.
wojtek