All Parties Are Not to Blame

Can I burn down your house?

No

Just the 2nd floor?

 No Garage?

No

Let's talk about what I can burn down.

No

YOU AREN'T COMPROMISING!

I think the source of this little dialogue is Judd Legume of Mother Jones Magazine.

Here Jim Fallows gives two reasons why this problem is so limited in it’s causes: 

If the House of Representatives voted on a "clean" budget bill -- one that opened up the closed federal offices but did not attempt to defund the Obama health care program -- that bill would pass, and the shutdown would be over. Nearly all Democrats would vote for it, as would enough Republicans to end the shutdown and its related damage. (And of course it would pass has already passed the Senate, repeatedly, unless the minority dared filibuster it, and would be signed by the president.) …

So far House Speaker John Boehner has refused to let this vote occur. His Tea Party contingent knows how the vote would go and therefore does not want it to happen; and such is Boehner's fear of them, and fear for his job as Speaker, that he will not let it take place. 

And here is a piece of Andrew Sullivan’s analysis of why there is so much aversion to “Obamacare”:

The bewildering economic and social and demographic changes have created a cultural and existential panic among those most heavily concentrated in those districts whose members are threatening to tear down the global economy as revenge for losing two presidential elections in a row. They feel they have already lost and have nothing to gain from any constructive engagement with a president they regard as pretty close to the anti-Christ of parasitic minorities. They feel isolated in a more multi-cultural country. They feel spied upon and condescended to. They have shut out any news sources apart from Fox. It does not occur to them, for example, that Obamacare might actually help them. And you get no actual specifics on policies they like or dislike. It is all abstractions based on impressions.

Sullivan's article helps me see why we are now so polarized.  It seems like we need a new language.