I don't have the time to respond to it just yet, but over at the League, Scott Payne just blew my mind. Anyone who has been reading my writing for the last year here at PE will understand why.
Money 'graph:
Right relationship of partisan tendencies is born out of a respect for the elements of an issue that a particular ideological perspective is best able to hit upon and articulate. Liberals, conservatives, progressives, and libertarians all emphasize different elements of different issues precisely because there is generally something important about the element that each grasps on to as its “first principle” on that front. In the articulation of first principles; however, we often become so identified with our own particular articulation and, perhaps even more overtly, the group identity we take on and draw strength from in locating others who agree with us, that we generate rhetorical blinders to the elements of issue that other perspective/ideologies identify and articulate. This calcification, it seems evident, can become so set in as to result in not just failing to notice the particular elements of an issue that ideologically opposed interlocutors point out, but rather denying the existence of those elements altogether.
It's a long post, but it just gets better from there. Please read the whole thing.
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