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1 BusyMonster  Thu, Dec 5, 2013 12:47:28pm

This does seem to be the main issue. They can’t walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, because they have no imagination.

And having no imagination leads to very stupid ideas, quite quickly.

2 Romantic Heretic  Thu, Dec 5, 2013 2:38:31pm

Oddly enough, this inability to imagine others leads to an inability to imagine themselves.

It often appears to me that conservatives, despite their persistent claims of individualism, are more often members of a tribe than they are individuals. To me it explains why they react so vehemently to dissent and criticism. Those things are a danger to the tribe. If the tribe falls they have nothing left.

An individual, in my opinion, knows that they are incomplete. That there are things they don’t know. That they can do wrong.

A tribal member cannot be incomplete because the tribe is not incomplete. They cannot be ignorant because the tribe is not ignorant. They cannot do wrong because the tribe cannot do wrong.

If a person is a member of a tribe, they cannot be individuals, or so I believe.

3 jvic  Thu, Dec 5, 2013 5:25:41pm
Conservatives simply lack the ability to see the world through any vantage point other than their own.

There’s a lot of that attitude going around, but it hurts Republicans more than it hurts Democrats.

Newt Gingrich on Meet the Press, 9 December 2012 (boldface mine):

Well, let me say, first of all, every Republican should be focused on what we just talked about. I mean, if their competitor in ‘16 is going to be Hillary Clinton, supported by Bill Clinton and presumably a still relatively popular president Barack Obama, trying to win that will be truly the Super Bowl. And the Republican Party today is incapable of competing at that level. And it’s part of this cultural thing with our consultants. I mean, if you start out thinking giving away 47 percent of the country, by the way, which included retirees, it included veterans. You know, it was an absurdity. And— and I think this is— this is much more than Mitt Romney. We didn’t blow it because of Mitt Romney. We blew it because of a party which has refused to engage the reality of American life and refused to take— to think through what the average American needs for a better future.

Yes.

This shouldn’t be a purely partisan issue. It should concern anyone who believes that, to function well, the US political system needs two parties which can govern competently and keep each other up to snuff.

4 majii  Thu, Dec 5, 2013 10:59:20pm

re: #2 Romantic Heretic

I’ve also noticed that most of the republicans (I refuse to call them conservatives because there’s nothing conservative about them) I interact with seem to display a deep need for someone to validate who they are. I think this may also be part of their tribalism. I couldn’t live this way. It would drive me nuts having to look to others to define myself and to discover what my next step/move would be. They remind me of a flock of birds in flight. Wherever the lead bird goes, they follow. I don’t think they spend a lot of time on self-introspection, either. It appears that they ask few/no questions and tend to believe whatever they’re told by their betters,


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