Andrew Sullivan today concisely lays out the difference between a liberal discourse and an illiberal one:
[Y]ou help me – through error and insight – to get closer to the truth sooner than if I were trying to understand the world alone. The competing approach is to regard the whole of public discourse as a zero sum game where each side is meant to seize whatever ground is immediately before it that day.
This is the tension between Jefferson and Machiavelli, and, since Machiavelli is clearly winning, we live in an illiberal polity, don’t we?
Here’s a ClearChannel billboard that was advertising Rush Limbaugh in Tuscon:
Prometheus Unbound 