Mainstream American political commentary, with its own touching faith in fair play, customarily assumes that the two great political parties do whatever they do as precise mirror images of each other; that if one is guilty of some misstep, the other is also automatically and equally culpable. The idea has a geometric elegance to it, and to journalists this doctrine of symmetry is especially appealing: It is a shortcut to fairness, an easy way to brush off the accusations of bias that plague them.…
There is no symmetry.
—Thomas Frank, The Wrecking Crew (New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2008), 266.
