The best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity. -- Yeats,
The Second Coming
It has always seemed to me that classic liberals are handicapped by their capacity to appreciate the other side's point of view (which waters down their conviction), while red meat conservatives are hampered by no such considerations. I'm told there is an extensive body of psychological research that suggests the two outlooks express two different stages of cognitive development.
The earlier stage, called in some circles "concrete operational", typically emerges during the latent period (ages roughly 7-14), and is characterized by identification with one's social role, and an unquestioning regard for the rules laid down by one's social affiliation. It lends itself to an ethnocentric, mythological worldview - my country (tribe, religion, team) right or wrong. God is on our side.
Then around adolescence there (hopefully) develops the capacity for critical thought. Guided by reason a person can see that his or her particular social group has no monopoly on truth or goodness. One begins to view the handed down rules with a critical eye. This stage is called "formal operational" and it is here that one begins to think for oneself, draw one's own conclusions about the nature of reality. Of course things are not so cut and dried at this stage. Doubt begins to set in (hence the liberal's debilitating dilemma). But because a person is now able to take the abstract leap outside one's own skin and see things from the other person's perspective, it lends itself to a broader, more global outlook -- we're all in this together.
Hence a Reagan era Republican would naturally subscribe to the received cold war mythology -- America in the white hat; Russia= evil empire -- while a liberal of that period might be "soft on communism" because he could see that for all its flaws the Marxist outlook was not without its virtues. The same cold war mentality drives Bush's "War on Terror" which any rational person can see fronts a very dubious agenda.
Bush's declaration "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists" is classic ethnocentric thinking. It makes no allowance for subtlety. We're the good guys; they're the bad guys, and thats all there is to it. And anyone wise to the fact that even bad guys can mount a valid critique is guilty of heresy, treason, comforting the enemy, etc. If you place yourself on that path you have placed yourself outside the fold and beyond the pale, you are one of "them", one of the devil's party, among the banished and the damned.
It might also be reflective of the two mindsets that some of us are content to sit in front of the TV and receive our marching orders as Consumers (that being our designated social role), while others of us know enough to feel insulted by that demeaning arrangement.
Be that as it may, the point is that it's a question of mental development. It does no good to hurl vituperations at those on the other side of the divide. They lack the necessary equipment to understand your position.
An old 1960's cartoon by the great Saul Steinberg shows two men fencing furiously inside the jaws of a giant crocodile. It's a perfect existential cameo of eternal human conflict. Us-against-them good-guy-bad-guy thinking has its origin in the lower stages of development. The minute you engage in it you have abandoned the higher ground from which vantage point you could recognize its inherent flaws.
While those seized by the pathetic myth of American (Christian, white, male, heterosexual) superiority are an obnoxious hazard to us all, those seized by the myth of Good Progressives vs. Bad Republicans are participating in the same underlying mindset. It's possibly more gratifying to take that position. Regression is not without its rewards. It's more fun to swagger like a macho Republican than to shuffle like a DLC mama's boy. But it does nothing to move the conversation past its current deadlock. It's painful to embrace the notion that you are in no real sense superior to your adversaries, but in the final analysis it's the only position that makes any sense. We are all evolving together, each at our own pace. We are all woven together into the same global fabric. Our crossed purposes form the warp and the weft. Whatever our political and cognitive differences, we need to be patient and respectful towards one another. Obviously that's a tall order given the maddening stupidity and inhumanity of any way of thinking that condones, for instance, torture and the bombing of children. (And obviously the bombs need to be taken out of the hands of the children who toss them with such wanton disregard). But if we could learn to understand that we are all on this planet together, breathing the same air, subject to many of the same frailties, that righteous anger raises the temperature without contributing any light, that if we want more people to embrace our positions we need to provide face-saving ways for them to be able to do so, that name-calling and trash talk might be appropriate primate behaviors but they do not really further the specifically human agenda -- if we could learn to understand all that (I believe that Jesus, that wise man, said something about honoring your enemies, it's just common sense really, a corollary of the Golden Rule and prime indicator that those who advocate torture are on the wrong track) or, as my Quaker grandmother put it:
If only the good could be clever
and only the clever be good
the world would be better than ever
we thought that it possibly could.
But alas, things seldom or never
turn out as they properly should
for the good are so hard on the clever
and the clever so rude to the good.
Or as Rodney King (who had more reason than most to feel angry and aggrieved) so memorably put it: Can't we all just get along?
At any rate, there appears to be considerable evidence that susceptibility to the Republican point of view has less to do with perverse and willful stupidity than with delayed cognitive development, a wide learning curve. You don't expect your four-year-old to give up pretending he's Superman; don't expect Bush to either. ;-D