If you guys don't mind a reply from someone who hasn't logged into the site in a couple of years, may I suggest Thomas Pynchon's Vineland for those who might be interested in the perhaps hackneyed divide between liberals and conservatives. The novel's setting is Raegan's ascendancy period and deals with the liberal and conservative sensibilities, and it does so through caricatures, but these are some brilliant, illuminating caricatures (sort of like
Juvenalian satire). And i forget who it was that said "caricatures accentuate the essential." Even Inherent Vice deals with the liberal nostalgia for a misremembered time versus the drive to reshape America into a ruthlessly efficient state/country. I think Vineland was published in the mid-1980s, but it's still relevant.