The left doesn't play the right like a fiddle.
It plays the stupid right for a fiddle.
You just don't want to admit the left is not as smart as you say
Some parts of the Left are morons, but not the leadership, not where it counts, where the plans against the Right are made.
Where as the inverse seems to be true on the Right; the some parts of the base is often smart, but the leadership are morons and there is a hardcore fringe who don't want any compromise on anything their hearts desire, who lie to the other parts of the base and try to pretend the Dems aren't rather perceptive to how their base operates and thinks.
I don't think you or anyone else will convince
@Bacle of this simply b/c that's what he's swallowed.
I'm also certain that
@Bacle has lots of reasons for his decision, but I think he's invested too much into that belief to disown it without something smashing him in the face (figuratively speaking of course).
No, I just actually have spent time around the smarter Dems, the ones really dangerous to the Right and who understand how to work the PR angles against the Right, and understand how much of the Right exists in echochambers where outside views are not welcome.
People here discount how smart and clever the Dems leadership has been in how they built their base, how informed them of how the GOP views them, how they control public education systems in most of the nation, and make the mistake of not understanding that the Dems, even part of the base, don't view hypocrisy as a vice, but as a weapon in politics that can let them win while holding the GOP to standards they themselves don't fulfill.
So the sub title of his book is "why good people are divided by politics and religion," and he's not claiming that the right is more righteous, he's exploring human morality.
In his studies he found that right wingers were more often able to explain the views and motivations behind left wing thought, while left wingers were much less able to do that about right wing positions.
They were more likely to jump to false assumptions about what/why the right believes what they do.
I looked up a summary of what he was claiming because I was having trouble remembering. It's centered around the moral foundations he lays out in his work.
I think he's pretty accurate with his assessment. Essentially, the left isn't as morally "complete," as in they put less interest in a lot of moral foundations that the right do, so they are unable to understand right wing positions.
My first example I can think of is abortion.
The left insists that the right wants to control women and their bodies. The right insists that it's to save babies lives.
The left can't comprehend that this is the right's position, so they think it's a lie, and look at it from their own moral framework, and decide that they obviously just want to control women. But if you talk to any right winger, and being someone who is anti abortion, we can tell you till we're blue in the face that it's about saving babies.
Reverse that: a right winger probably will have better luck explaining why a liberal is pro abortion. They don't believe it's a baby yet, they believe in the autonomy of their own body, etc. Meanwhile they just don't believe that we think it's killing s baby.
Ok, the problem here is he was operating on an 'understanding moral foundations/empathy' basis and trying to understand the divide in a way that wouldn't look odd outside a Lefty sociology dept, which is not what I meant and is why his analysis fails in this context.
I meant 'understanding' is more akin to...tactical knowledge of enemy weaknesses to exploit for political gain, because that is how the Dems mostly view 'understanding' the Right; as a weapon against the Right, not a means of coexistence.
I know but thr argument is there
The argument is there because frankly I think the Right has been overselling it's effectiveness, cleverness, and understanding of it's opponents for a while now.
Without a former NYC Dem in Trump, the GOP wouldn't have had any hope of catching up to the Dems in the political and cultural conflict, and Trump proved to not be so great at the follow-through or ego-checking.
If the GOP understood the Left as well as it claims, we wouldn't be in the present political circumstances.