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When I was a child, I remember going for drives with my father along the Northern California coast, up along Bodega Bay. The road was windy and hugged the ocean cliffs. I was terrified of the thought of plunging over those cliffs in our car and hated the notion of not being in control of the car, even though I was only 8 or 9 years old.
Later, when I learned to drive myself, I was driving a friend home from the airport. I had borrowed his car while he came home to the states for a wedding. On the 3 hour drive back to our base, he fell asleep. He slept a good 2 hours in the car. When he woke up, I was jokingly angry, telling him he didn't keep me company at all on the drive back. He responded, "Take it as a compliment, I hardly ever sleep when someone else is driving. It's a sign of trust."
Some of us trust in our political leaders because they do the thinking for us. We give to them our support because we believe that they know what they are doing and they are keepers of our faith. When we trust in them to this extent, we don't think enough for ourselves because we believe they have our best interests in mind and are doing exactly what we would do if in control. It is comforting to us in those times to know that someone is in control that we can trust, so we can sleep, ideologically.
Others are wide awake while our political leaders are at the wheel. We don't trust that they will get us to our destination safely and demand to know everything they are doing, and if we feel they are doing something wrong, will become a very vocal backseat driver. We are the ones pointing out the oncoming traffic, the barrier-less curves hugging the cliffs, the speed with which they are driving. We would feel much more secure if we were doing the driving ourselves, but we can't, so we exercise control the only way we can, by pointing out every danger.
Those who trust in our leaders because they share a common idea or belief system want those who mistrust to shut up and let the leader drive. They're trying to sleep and our constant racket is disturbing them. However, if we don't keep it up, we could crash.
When we question the honesty, wisdom, motives, and/or methods of our leaders whom we mistrust, we are also questioning the same people who support them. No one likes to be wrong and having our mistakes constantly pointed out and examined so closely is frustrating. It is easier to maintain the status quo of our own beliefs than to question their validity. To me, this is a simple matter of sociology. If you trust your doctor, you have no reason to question why he or she prescribed you a particular medication. You don't necessarily want to know that he or she received a kickback to prescribe that particular medication. To find this out causes you to question every other decision your doctor has made. This epiphany can be quite frightening for many people. It is easier to accept that your doctor knows best and go with his or her recommendations.
The difference between that and this forum is that you don't have a multitude of people in the doctor's office shouting to you that your doctor is a fraud and is corrupted in his or her decisions. I imagine that if this were the case, then doctors' offices everywhere would resemble the politics forum here.
In this forum, we are constantly having to defend our fundamental beliefs on a daily - sometimes hourly - basis. Both sides of the political spectrum wear each hat, the sleeper and the backseat driver, depending upon who is in control. To us, our view is so obvious and logical that anyone who disagrees is a buffoon for they are clearly ignoring common sense.
What we witness here is not the first reaction the other side has to us, but the end result of having to constantly defend their position. The frustration gets to us and after feeling like you're beating your head against a wall, it becomes quite easy to simply insult or threaten she or he to whom you are speaking. It's not good, but it makes perfect sense that this would happen.
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"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am" - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses
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