A Liberal Learns To Compete

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/magazine/a-liberal-learns-to-compete.html?smid=pl-share

From the NY Times, full interview at link above, excerpt below:

Your book “The Righteous Mind” addresses the psychological reasons that politics are so divided right now. I wonder what your take would be on conservatives’ fury over John Roberts’s health care decision.
My colleague Pete Ditto studied people’s attitudes about mavericks and demonstrated that everybody likes to think that they value mavericks; but actually we like mavericks only if they’re on the other side. If they’re on our side, we call them traitors.

We keep hearing that the partisan divide is at an all-time high, but isn’t this ignoring the sweep of history? Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton. Preston Brooks nearly killed Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate over slavery.
The 1930s through the 1970s was the aberration, a time of extraordinarily low partisanship. In the ’80s, it began to shoot up. The good news is that it can’t get much worse. It’s about as bad as it can possibly get, mathematically, in the House of Representatives.

I have relatives who are Southern conservative Republicans, who say that the fact that almost the entire black population voted for Barack Obama is as inherently racist as the idea that all whites would vote for a white candidate. Do they have a point?
Had a Jew run at any point in the 20th century, just about every Jew would have voted for him, so I can’t criticize blacks for voting for a black president. There’s an enormous difference between voting for a candidate because you hate another ethnic group and voting for a candidate because he’s a member of your ethnic group.

Honestly, most conservatives I know, if they even heard the words “moral psychologist,” they would immediately shut down.
Well, it is true that on the left there’s greater interest in new ideas, and it’s overwhelmingly liberals who buy social-science trade books like mine. The main reaction from people on the left seems to be, “Hey, liberals, you’ve all got to read this book because this will help us win elections.” The reviews on the right say: “Hey, conservatives, you should all read this book because it shows that we have more moral foundations than they do. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.”