I just read a delightful (in a black humored sort of way) post up at Balloon Juice.  It offers a way to calculate the number of “crazies” on the political right, people for whom no fact or logic will work at getting them to question a belief and whose partisanship is completely blind.

A much more difficult question to answer is whether there is a similar number for the other side.  I am sure such a number exists, because of folks I met during the 60s, but I think it is much much lower.  My reason for saying so is that the left does not base so much of its appeal on fear and anger.  Those elements are there to be sure, but they are recessive.  Even so, blind partisanship exists. The drug of self-righteousness is addictive and powerful. They are there, but I think no where near 27%.
This leads me to think about the heavy correspondence between alternative spiritual traditions in the US and support for progressive causes such as abolitionism, suffrage, and the like.  What they have in common is a concern, be it well or poorly stated, insightful or foolishly conceptualized, for others. The only “other” for which the contemporary right evidences much concern is the fetus.  To care about others requires some capacity for empathy, and to care about whom we do not know, and may never know, requires even greater capacity for empathy.  
Perhaps the old spiritual argument that love and care for others  is the ultimate value is also the cure for the social disease wrongly labeled as “conservatism” that afflicts us today. But how to reach their hearts?  I wish I knew.
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