Can’t we be a bit more self-aware when we dismiss conservatives as so cocky and narrow-minded that they should be excluded from large swaths of higher education? Cocky? Narrow-minded? I suggest that we look in the mirror. -Nicholas Kristof, The Liberal Blind Spot

In every culture, there must be a vessel that holds negative energy. It is what depth psychologist Carl Jung called the “Shadow” of the culture’s collective unconscious. It is “The Other”. It is the projection of that culture’s own dark side.

  The Other must be created, for it is a defense mechanism that allows the culture to avoid dealing with difficult or unwanted feelings.

  Thus, there is all that is perceived to be “right”, and anything that opposes that order must be – by definition – wrong. It must come from darkness. It must be evil.

One of the unfortunate habits overtaking the left is a tendency to conclude that any behavior that could plausibly be motivated by bigotry is likely motivated by bigotry. It is no doubt true that a misogynist would want Joe Biden to challenge Hillary Clinton. Therefore, Scott Lemieux concludes, people who want Biden to challenge Clinton are sexist...

  This particular form of illogic has gotten endemic on the left. A racist would oppose Barack Obama, but that doesn't make all opposition to Obama racist. -Jonathan Chait

Can liberals really be so fatuous as to believe that the profound challenges of politics, which have confronted and usually gotten the better of statesmen and philosophers for millennia, are in fact so simple that gentle admonitions to play nice are all we need to secure peace and justice? And are liberals really so self-righteous as to insist that opposition to, or even skepticism about, their project can be explained entirely in terms of their opponents’ greed, cruelty, and pathological mean-spiritedness? The short answers are yes, and yes. -Scott Johnson

Why is it so hard for liberals to just argue the idea instead of judging a person’s entire earthly value based on a political opinion? -Kira Davis

They Just Don't Understand...

"I don’t understand. You’re so smart; how can you be a Republican?"

Progressive Understanding...

  In his remarkable book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Haidt recalls a telling experiment. He and his colleagues Brian Nosek and Jesse Graham sought to discover how well conservative and what Haidt terms ‘liberal’ (ie: progressive) students understood one another by having them answer moral questions as they thought their political opponents would answer them.

  “The results were clear and consistent,” remarks Haidt. “In all analyses, conservatives were more accurate than liberals.” Asked to think the way a liberal thinks, conservatives answered moral questions just as the liberal would answer them, but liberal students were unable to do the reverse. Rather, they seemed to put moral ideas into the mouths of conservatives that they don’t hold.

  To put it bluntly, Haidt and his colleagues found that progressives don’t understand conservatives the way conservatives understand progressives.