Once we had a society in which certain things were more important than politics. It's a good topic for a thread about the law because for several hundred years, all "sides" agreed that there were several "rules" that were so important, both sides needed to follow them, so that there was sufficient trust to go around to allow people to negotiate through periods of intense disagreement. Even if one "side" had control of the White House and both branches of Congress, there were still "rules" that mattered so much, they'd be observed, because in the long run it was more important for all of us to have a framework within which we could get along than it was for one side totally to dominate the other.
I don't think I'm alone in being concerned about whether that is still the case or not in the past five years. I was very surprised to find some validation from a totally unexpected source.
Someone did a psychological study that compared how conservatives and progressives viewed each other and the world. In an interesting twist, each side was asked to explain the other side's point of view.
To oversimplify:
-- conservatives
could explain the progressive point of view. They merely disagreed with it. To them, progressives meant well and were merely misguided or unable to think things through clearly. They were not inherently bad, just naive.
-- progressives were
not able to explain the conservative point of view. Lacking the ability to understand it, their fallback explanation was that conservatives "must have" something inherently wrong with their moral character. There was not merely a disagreement about good or bad ideas, there was a fundamental difference between good and evil itself.
