"In reality, most Americans are quite firmly in the center, and don't see themselves as belonging to any extreme."

I suppose it's all relative - but from a European perspective, your centre is way way to the right of what most people here would see as centre politics.

What comes across is that most of the divisions that are presented as left-right issues are about issues that don't really fit on a left-right spectrum at all. Things like gun control and gay marriage, for example.

Maybe, paradoxically that's another way of saying what artbrooks is saying. Except I'd call it a division among people who are evidently right of centre.

That doesn't mean that the differences doen't matter, because it does. As Noam Chomsky is reported as saying this week (in an interview in which he described the Democrats and Republicans as "two factions of the business party") : "But despite the limited differences both domestically and internationally, there are differences. In a system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes."