I think that one of the key differences that distinguish Americans on the right from moderates and liberals lies in that the mentality of the right is closer to the way most people throughout history have thought. They think tribally, and they believe that it's either kill or be killed, that either you're with us or you're against us.

It's a mentality that seems primitive and reactionary to the educated, cosmopolitan mind, but it's an attitude that throughout most of history made practical sense. Because most of history is the story of gang warfare, of warlords,
and violent turf battles, sometimes on a small scale sometime on a
global scale, but it always boils down to the same fundamental impulse:
We need to kill them before they kill us. For most people in the history
of the world, that wasn't paranoid thinking, it was realistic thinking.
The difference now between the right and Liberals is that Liberals believe we have evolved past that
kind of barbarism and people on the right think we haven't.

I was watching several Gregory Peck movies last month, and among them was
"The Guns of Navarone".  One of the movie's subplots was the
relationship between the Peck character and the Anthony Quinn character,
a Greek ally with whom Peck fought against the Germans. We learn that
Quinn had vowed to kill Peck because Peck in a gesture of humanity
spared the lives of some captured Germans.  These Germans escaped and
eventually killed Quinn's wife and children. Quinn vowed to kill Peck
for his stupid, misplaced decency.

Liberals would argue that's just right-wing
propaganda, but Quinn's position is, as a practical matter, more realistic. For the historical norm In war is either kill or be killed–everything
else is posturing and propaganda, and anybody who doesn't understand
that is a dangerous fool. The Quinns of the world understand from hard experience
how the world works, and the Pecks do not until they've had some sense knocked into them. Once you accept the violence game
on its own terms, as most humans in the history or the world have been forced to do, then really there is no such thing as civilization
and decency.

The violence game operates within a closed system, and it's all about killing or being killed. Showing mercy
in that game is a sign of weakness that is just going to get you and yours killed
in the long run. And they understand that all the talk about human rights and being fair
and doing the right thing is b.s., because when your survival is at
stake the only thing that matters is surviving, and excesses in the
service of survival might be regrettable, but that's just the way it is.
You do what you have to do. Just-war theory, Geneva Accords, etc., are all just
lipstick on the Gorgon–feeble attempts to impose some sense of order on what is fundamentally a plunge into horror and chaos. 

Moderates and Liberals look at the people on the Right and think them paranoid, and paranoia is certainly a characteristic of the extreme-right mindset, but as the old cliche goes, a liberal is a conservative who hasn't been mugged. As we saw after 9/11, an awful lot of moderates and liberals found their inner paranoid and got behind a war in Iraq that never ever made any sense. Fear makes us all stupid, but we're all walking on a thin sheet of ice, and that's all that separates us from plunging into that collective paranoia, and when we do we'll be feeling and behaving the way most people throughout history have. And we'll learn to call it normal; throughout most of history it has been.

That so many of us have lived lives in which we have not had to worry about such violence as an ordinary part of our experience is more the historical aberration than the norm, but there's no reason to believe that we won't revert to the norm. People on the right differ from "normal" people in that they don't accept the historical aberration as normative. They live in the expectation that we will revert to it any day now, and they're prepared. They have stocked their bunkers, and they're armed and ready to defend themselves against the inevitable barbarian predators. 

That their attitudes feed into a self-fulfilling prophecy doesn't change the fact that the prophecy often comes true. Liberals believe there would be no problems if everyone would just think as they do, and maybe they're right, but the problem is that too many, maybe most people don't, and that all it takes is a small group of well-organized, well-armed, and well-funded "crazies" to cause us all to plunge through the ice. That doesn't mean the right is right; it doesn't mean that we should concede that their way of thinking is the only way. It just means that moderates and Liberals need to understand what they're up against, and that they are naive to be complacent that our current sense of "order" is a permanent condition. History argues otherwise.

I'm not a pacifist, because I know that I would use violence to protect
those I love from violence, but I also know that Gandhian non-violence
is the only way to create an infusion point of grace into the closed
system of violence described above.  Violence is the way of the world in
a fallen world, and grace, not reason, offers the only solution
that comes from outside the fallen system. That's the difference between Christians and secular Liberals. Liberals think that being reasonable with people possessed by fear is still possible. It just isn't. 

The only antidote to people possessed by the primitive subconscious is to offer them an escape by way of the supra conscious. And perhaps we'll see emerge in the next decade groups of spiritually motivated, well-organized, credible Christian/Gandhians to offer us an alternative that just isn't on the scene today. I entertained some hope that with Obama's election normal human decency might still have a chance, but it's clear now that the system is too far gone. Even with Dems in power the system can't provide health benefits to the 9/11 first responders, much less extension of benefits to the unemployed in a major economic crisis.  The system sees these people as losers, and the logic of violence requires rewarding only winners. No argument appealing to reason or normal
human decency can have an effect anymore. The solution has to come from outside the system.