First it was Joe Klein’s myth gap; now it’s the empathy gap between liberals and conservatives.
Liberal writer Judith Warner went to the McCain-Palin rally in Fairfax on Wednesday and “discovered that the Palin Phenomenon is no laughing matter.” She ends her blog post by referencing University of Virginia professor Jonathan Haidt’s recent essay, “What Makes People Vote Republican?†(emphasis added):
Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view. “Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,†he told me in a phone interview.
Sort of calls into question their professed concern for the common man, doesn’t it?
CLARIFICATION: I just read Haidt’s “What Makes People Vote Republican?” and assumed the research mentioned in the quote from Warner above was in that article. It is not. Apparently Warner learned of it from her interview with Haidt and not from the linked article. Just wanted to clarify that.
