I belive it was Toqueville who had predicted that radical individualism was going to be one of the greatest "threats" to American Democracy, one that can be said to cause the American Civil War, and one that continues to plague this country with the extremely partisan politics that surround nearly everything that the government deals with today.
Now our little expiriment certainly has worked out fairly well, but there have been plenty of hiccups along the way. Granted the great part about the way American democracy has worked has for the most part been that Americans care more for one another simply because they are Americans... We don't view eachother as someone who is from Michigan or Ohio (read into our state's rivalry, its funny), if we are Catholic or Muslim, Democrat or Republican.
...Its the "respect" that has kept this country together for so long...
When things get bad, people often move twards exteme measures to fix their current problems at hand. What worries me most about the 2008 election is that because of what has happened in Iraq, the average voter may retreat to the side of the far-left-wing Democrats and could push the country back 20 years in terms of economic and social issues. Granted, there will always be people like me who will vote to keep their Congressional representatives on their "side," another thorn in the side of the Executive Office, and stop the bad from happening.