conservatives don't understand liberals...is the reverse true?
Jonathan Chait writes in the LA Times about an upcoming sitcom starring Calista Flockhart as a conservative pundit. Chait criticizes one of the show’s writers for not knowing that Bill Buckley wasn’t an Eisenhower Republican, and notes that the NYT has twice referred to Buckley as a neoconservative. Chait concludes:
Even if sitcom writers and newspaper reporters get things wrong, there's still a deep sense among the liberal intelligentsia that it's important to understand conservative thinking in all its permutations.But where are the right's efforts at outreach? You don't hear conservatives mourning their lack of common ground with the English department at Columbia University. In fact, it's incredibly rare to find a conservative who understands liberalism as anything other than hatred for the rich and a desire to hand over our foreign policy to the United Nations.
Winning, apparently, gives conservatives the luxury of not having to care what the other side thinks. [emphasis added]
Chait is correct that those liberals who are ill-versed in conservative taxonomy—but who nonetheless understand their positions—are a far cry from conservatives who make no attempt to comprehend liberalism and prefer to rely solely on stereotypes.