We’re used to just about every American controversy polarizing swiftly along right-left lines, but the discussion of events in Ferguson has been a striking exception thus far. Within the commentariat, the most interesting division has opened within American conservatism, where a large group of conservative and libertarian writers have been much less inclined than perhaps they/we would have been thirty years ago to give the police the benefit of the doubt. …
At the same time, though, the polling to date suggests that a more predictable sort of polarization (albeit one slightly less stark than in the Trayvon Martin controversy) is showing up on the mass level: There are stark white-black and conservative-liberal cleavages over how to interpret events in Ferguson, what kind of racial lens to use, whether the justice system can be trusted to work fairly, etc. CONT.
Ross Douthat, New York Times