Liberals vs Conservatives: Who's Right?

Great post! I've always felt that the underscoring difference between political parties/beliefs was a difference of foundational beliefs. So yes, I agree with Haidt's theory. Like you, I'm unsure of how well "listening and compromising" will work in today's world. I've had many heated arguments with my family members over the ideas of taxes, immigration, and healthcare. It's hard to completely change one's foundation and because it is the core of our beliefs, I think politics will forever be an uphill battle.
My approach to understanding and compromising is imagining life on the other side. In my case, I'd still want to give money towards universal healthcare even if I made bank, mostly because I believe more in liberty than authority.

I think in today's society we get absolutely no where because of the liberal and conservatism views. People are at a gridlock because people are either too far to the right or too far to the left. This gridlock is exactly what are founding fathers wanted to avoid; it has came to this unfortunate thing however. I also have had many arguments with friends and more so with teachers. Here, at the University of Minnesota, there are a vast amount of liberal teachers and I feel they can be biased, which isn't really fair I think!

I find this post very interesting. Todays government has such a hard time making any headway because people vote according to their political party's views and not how they feel personally. I think to believe someone is strictly Republican and Democrat is foolish these people need to look at each issue individually and decide for themselves what they feel to be the best choice.

This is a very hot topic right now Liz with the presidential election coming up and Haidt's book taking off. I think he does a great job at helping us understand why these differences between political parties are so intractable. His argument that these ideologies are based on moral differences is unique and informative in the sense that he emphasizes emotions rather than cognitions.

We get no where when arguing these points with people who are different from us politically because often we try to reason with the other side and point out all the logical and factual information why we are right and they are wrong.

Haidt's insight is that all this logic and reason comes after the emotional reaction we have to the issue. We feel a certain way about abortion or about gay marriage and that is the foundation from which we build our position.

Few people have the skill or the insight to understand and respect the emotional basis from which people make their decisions. We believe that others can be persuaded to adopt our position if they simply think like we do. But really it may be that they have to feel something different and that is much more difficult to change.

I believe that it is adaptive for humans to have a culture that expresses different feelings for sensitive issues. That it might get us into trouble if we all tended to feel the same way about everything. That there are times we as a society need to be more conservative and times when we need to be more liberal and that we need both perspectives to thrive.