The way I see it, the left tried really, really hard for a long time. They probably tried badly, but they did try. The intellectual left loves to pump out articles and books trying to explain right-wing thought:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind
https://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/do-as-i-d... (paywall)
Whereas books by prominent conservatives tend to have titles like "Demonic : How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America" and "Liberal Fascism : The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change". (Not that the left doesn't produce books with similar titles, but they don't get wide distribution, while you've heard of Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg).
Your statement is probably true, but it's as a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy. If one side insists long enough that that the other side is literally evil, they won't be understood no matter how hard their opponents try.
Every time liberals lose elections, there is hand-wringing about understanding the other side. But I've never seen the equivalent worry about how conservatives can understand liberals. Instead, the response is usually to do the same thing even harder -- which works, because it generates enthusiastic support from the far right and grudging support from the center, while compromise bores
everybody.
It eventually resulted in Trump, whose primary skill is in being deliberately offensive. And it would have worked again, had a literal pandemic not intervened. He remains incredibly popular with the right -- not because he tries to understand liberals, but because he specifically rejects the notion that there's anything there to understand.
This conclusion is repugnant, and I rejected it for a very long time. But it seems inescapable. And I have no idea what to recommend, because it seems clear that no amount of me trying harder to understand is going to help. I do believe, however, that additional calls for equivalence are detrimental. They deny the reality that the split is asymmetric, and therefore shunt us into lines of thought that will continue to prove ineffective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_the_Matter_with_Kansa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind https://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/do-as-i-d... (paywall)
Whereas books by prominent conservatives tend to have titles like "Demonic : How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America" and "Liberal Fascism : The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change". (Not that the left doesn't produce books with similar titles, but they don't get wide distribution, while you've heard of Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg).
Your statement is probably true, but it's as a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy. If one side insists long enough that that the other side is literally evil, they won't be understood no matter how hard their opponents try.
Every time liberals lose elections, there is hand-wringing about understanding the other side. But I've never seen the equivalent worry about how conservatives can understand liberals. Instead, the response is usually to do the same thing even harder -- which works, because it generates enthusiastic support from the far right and grudging support from the center, while compromise bores everybody.
It eventually resulted in Trump, whose primary skill is in being deliberately offensive. And it would have worked again, had a literal pandemic not intervened. He remains incredibly popular with the right -- not because he tries to understand liberals, but because he specifically rejects the notion that there's anything there to understand.
This conclusion is repugnant, and I rejected it for a very long time. But it seems inescapable. And I have no idea what to recommend, because it seems clear that no amount of me trying harder to understand is going to help. I do believe, however, that additional calls for equivalence are detrimental. They deny the reality that the split is asymmetric, and therefore shunt us into lines of thought that will continue to prove ineffective.