If you take your fear and mash it into something that's actually useful, then it doesn't feel like it wins.
But this is the great danger America faces. That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.
In Hollywood you always feel a bit like a hake. The publicists march people up and down in front of you and they interview you... You feel like the turbot and the sea-bream go by, and you're the hake.