I recently read an article in Utne titled "Liberals Aren't Un-American. Conservatives Aren't Ignorant." The writer of the article focuses on the work Jonathan Haidt, a Psychology Professor at the U of Virginia, and his work in trying to make people see political viewpoints from moral and diverse perspectives.
What he's hitting on is what I've learned from studying classical rhetoric and teaching argument-based writing over the years. People can have the same data, the same info, the same examples, and they will argue about a problem or proposed solution because they have very different beliefs and assumptions, what the Greek rhetoricians called pathos.
As the author states that Haidt's quest is to "help people overcome morally motivated misunderstandings." Although the professor is a self-proclaimed liberal atheist, he has this to say about our strange and limited liberal-conservative dichotomy: "I do believe if liberals ran the whole world, it would fall apart. But if conservatives ran the whole world, it would be so restrictive and uncreative that it would be rather unpleasant, too."
You should note, however, that recent psychological research has found that the old saw about young people being liberal and then turning conservative later in life is pretty much bs. As Winograd and Hais, authors of Millenial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics, assert, "most people rarely change the fundamental patterns of perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes they learn when they are growing up."
Haidt has a couple of websites too: CivilPolitics.org and YourMorals.org. The second site offers a battery of quizzes that are pretty interesting. I took a few, and my answers tended toward my liberal-leaning brethren, but I'm more like conservatives in my valuing of authority and loyalty.
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