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It should be clear by now that the battle lines of the 2008 election extend far beyond the mere personalities and ideologies of presidential contenders John McCain and Barack Obama. In a brilliant and now-infamous piece of cinematic sociology, entitled “The McCain-Palin Mob,” blogger interrupted lets the McCainomaniacs and Palinophiles of Strongsville, Ohio, put their feet in their collective mouth by asking them a simple question about Obama: “Do you think he’s a terrorist?” The answers—“he’s a one-man terror cell,” “he’s got the blood lines,” “look at the name”—speak volumes about the depths of human ignorance being plumbed by the McCain-Palin campaign in its quest for the White House.

Lest one speculate that the Trailer Park denizens captured on video by blogger interrupted are simply an unmedicated fringe that roams the hinterlands of Ohio, Tim Craig of The Washington Post reminds us that the chairman of the Virginia Republican Party, state delegate Jeffrey M. Frederick of Prince William, has warned that both Obama and Osama bin Laden “have friends that bombed the Pentagon,” while Dana Milbank describes the touching way in which Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, GOP Chairman Bill Platt pointed out repeatedly to a crowd of McCain-Palin faithful that an Obama victory in November raises the nightmarish specter of a U.S. President with the middle name “Hussein.” “Break out the white sheets, Martha—there’s a darkie with a funny name and an Ivy League education headed for the White House!”

One does not have to subscribe to Obama’s centrist, Clintonesque brand of milquetoast liberalism, or belong to his cult-of-personality fan club, to recognize that the Obama vs. McCain contest qualifies as a “culture war” in the finest sense. This is not simply a battle between supporters and opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It’s a battle between those who think the Enlightenment was a largely positive development in human history and those who would probably oppose it today if they knew what it was.

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The rapid rise and fall of the (first) Wall Street bailout bill on Capitol Hill has engendered considerable confusion as to what, exactly, would have been bailed out. A small and exclusive club of extravagantly wealthy bankers driven to stupidity by their own myopic greed? An entire economy that’s bleeding to death financially? Or, perhaps, a little bit of both?

Some commentators were far too quick to dismiss any opposition to the bailout as suicidal flailing by individuals who are either dangerously unenlightened or downright delusional when it comes to recognizing the imminent peril we all face. For instance, on September 29, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post attributed the bill’s failure to congressional “lunatics” and “zealots”—meaning those on the Left who cringe at the thought of rescuing C.E.O.s whose net worth exceeds the G.D.P.s of many countries, and those on the Right who dread such blatant government intervention in their beloved and inaccurately named “free market.”

The September 29 New Yorker, on the other hand, offers a more nuanced analysis of why the Wall Street crisis and its remedy are such a muddied mess. James Surowiecki observes that the collective enterprise known as “Wall Street” is basically a confidence game in the sense of being dependent upon each player’s “faith” that his or her fellow players can actually deliver on their promises. Nick Paumgarten goes even further, pointing out that Wall Street’s machinations are based heavily on “magical thinking,” by which one basically tries really, really hard to will something into being—in this case, pretending that something as arcane and contrived as a “credit-default swap” is actually “worth” something.

All of which brings us to the heart of the matter: whether you’re trading electronic stocks, bank notes, gold nuggets, or cowry shells, all monetary and financial transactions ultimately depend on the power of imagination—pretending that whatever it is you’re trading has some inherent value. And, for the U.S. economy to function, everyone must agree that the imaginary value of their stocks, notes, nuggets, and shells should be a measure of their entitlement to everything from yachts and Prada handbags to food and shelter. We live in a system in which one person’s imaginary wealth (company stock, say) is tied to another person’s means of survival (like the ability to acquire food using the wages received from that company).

It is a scenario that presents an age-old political conundrum, especially during times of crisis: is it better to prop up a deeply flawed system of economic inequality that harms people at the bottom because its collapse might harm even more people at the bottom—or to create a more sensible and equitable system and accept the fact that enormous numbers of people will probably be harmed during the wrenching transition from the old system? Should the greedy banker be saved so that his employees can keep their jobs? Or do we take the risk of creating a system in which greedy bankers don’t have the power to determine who eats and who doesn’t?