Some thoughts on Jonathan Haidt’s work.
Note all the umbrage in comments from “liberals” (they’re not really — they’re leftists). But I’ve never seen them address the issue of why conservatives and libertarians are so much better at predicting a “liberal” viewpoint than the other way around.
[Update a few minutes later]
Bad link. Fixed now.
I think the link is wrong. It goes to the Obamacare back-end fixes drop dead date article.
Well, some of the annoyed liberals do try to answer the question. But their answers seem to be based on making things up, like assuming that the conservatives who answered were much more moderate (thus understanding of both sides) than the liberals who answered.
Naturally, we conservatives enjoy reading about a liberal who is going around telling other liberals that they are two-out-of-five-dimensional caricatures of the human beings that conservatives are. I’d be annoyed too.
But I’ll tell you that I grew up in liberal California, in a very liberal family. I don’t know if I met another real conservative till after I graduated college (also in California). Certainly no one who spoke up. When I eventually did meet a group of serious religious conservatives (actually Dennis Prager and a camp he ran) I was astonished. It was a little like Harry Potter must have felt when he saw Diagon Alley for the first time: a whole vast new world. The people I had met did actually seem to have more dimensions as human beings than I had known was possible. I still feel that way; liberals from back home seem stunted to me.
You may be the proper person to clarify something for someone who leans more libertarian than conservative. The list of five values includes loyalty and authority, neither of which strike me as particularly conservative, and, in fact, carry associations of blindness, as in blind obedience or blind loyalty. This would, of course, be in keeping with a liberal’s views of conservatives as unthinking, but I’m wondering what conservatives think about those two values? I understand sanctity, but I’d substitute self-reliance or personal responsibility as conservative values not shared by modern progressives.