I just read Jonathan Haidt's book and am still not persuaded. And my "intuition", however flawed, useless and unenlightened, tells me that newly minted "centrist" Jonathan Haidt is more than a little supercilious and I was glad to see Hayes push him a little bit. I found it somewhat poignant that he suggests the answer is for people to have dinner parties with both liberals and conservatives so they can share food and talk about all this together. He seems to think this is highly unusual when in fact it happens at Thanksgivings and Christmases and Sunday dinners across the country. Indeed, many of us have been living this "experiment" our whole lives. Let's just say the old fashioned elite Tip 'n Ronnie, bipartisan Georgetown dinners aren't exactly the prototype for most of us.
It's a tough problem, but one that I'm fairly sure won't be solved by "centrism" of the kind Jonathan Haidt proposes. We only have to look at the Democratic Party of the past quarter century to see how well his theory works in practice.
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