"Idealism counts - but it counts with a sword"

clipped from echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com Who Pays As They Wait For Our Ideals? by Anthony McCarthy  The all or nothing fixation, the worst kind of this idealism, is a form of self-satisfied preening. It has been with us for as long as one leftist could attain personal status by being the most leftist in the room. It has helped lead us into the disaster we find ourselves in today. And it has produced nothing. Nothing. Rigid, uncompromising and insistent idealism is sterile and useless in the real world. It would be better to call it what it really is, vanity.

Everything said here is just as correct when speaking of the US Right.

Pit the two against one another and you have the perfect conditions for a civil war, for many of the same reasons that led Jefferson to predict the First.