I was taught to be able to argue the other sides opinion as well because then you truly understand what you believe.
Then why do only liberals have a problem understanding it? Why are moderates and conservatives able to understand without difficulty? Are they not "lay person"s?
EDIT: To add a little more substance. I think the incoherence stems from the fact that the current conservative alliance is formed from approximately 3 distinct groups, with different priorities. You have the religious folks who care about abortion, same-sex marriage, drug laws, etc... And then you have the blue collar group that cares more about immigration, guns, etc.. And then you have the pro-business group which mostly cares about taxes and deregulation. From the outside looking in, it shouldn't be surprising that it's hard to empathize with the 'conservative' world view, because the external manifestations of that worldview are often very contradictory (i.e. why would a group that supports small-government also support the drug war, etc...)
I see many of the same aspects of incoherence among Democrats and you don't exactly have to look for it in the hidden trenches of the Democratic party. I certainly don't think Sen. Feinstein's views on encryption are in line with those of an open progressive society.
I see the same hypocrisy in Democrats' views on gun control, and specifically the prohibition against convicted felons exercising their constitutional right to bear arms.
I'm generally of the opinion that the criminal justice system in the US is fundamentally broken and institutionally racist/discriminatory. Going by that premise, and seeing the specific hurdles that poor people, and specifically poor black men, face in terms of selective enforcement, likelihood of being offered pretrial plea bargains, chances of conviction, and length of sentencing, I find it hard to view any laws that hope to strip citizens of their rights based on a tainted justice system as anything other than racist. And yet, these laws are broadly supported by both Democrats and Republicans.
An electoral system that can naturally support only two substantially competitive parties guarantees that parties that cannot maintain incoherence will also not be major parties. While the electoral system empirically does reduce the significant axes of variation of political vies in the population [1], it doesn't reduce it so far as to actually fit on the one-dimensional axis implied by a two-party system. So the major parties must be incoherent to be competitive.
[1] See, Arendt Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy for research on this.
[edit after the edit - please don't edit after someone has already replied - it makes the replier look bad]
From the outside, Democrats can be viewed as a bunch of special interests under one tent. I find much of these "group slicing" to be problematic when talking about the GOP as I don't think its really those groups or the ultimate belief is what is reported. Viewing a group through another group's lens is fraught with peril.
Kind of odd -- everyone immediately jumps down parent's throat, but it's not like tax cuts for 'job creators' and universal health care as 'death panels' aren't actual factual conservative talking points, part of an easily verifiable historical record (I'll concede the "attacks on regulations and consumer/environmental protections marketed as 'making government more efficient'"). I presume those that speak those views are No True Conservatives?
Actually (without getting into methodological issues and whether he has actually shown anything), the conclusion would be more accurately stated as that liberal are unable to accurately predict the manner in which conservatives would prefer to express their worldview, whereas the reverse is not true.
I think that, to the extent this is accurate at all (and this type of research on broadly characterizing liberals and conservatives, from either side, is fraught with opportunities -- often realized -- to take broad fuzzy terms and operationalize them in ways which reinforces researchers' own ideological biases), what it really reflects is the fact that liberals in-group language is the same as the common language of the broader society and, particularly, entertainment media (to which, then, moderates and conservatives are still heavily exposed), whereas conservatives in-group language is something to which liberals are far less exposed (mainly propagated through conservative churches and similar institutions).
(This is also feeds -- though its not the sole source of -- the liberal view of conservative dishonesty, in that the main context in which liberals encounter conservative in-group language is in conservative advocacy of public policy positions, where the language used to articulate conservative values is used in a way which clashes with liberals expected use of language, and seems dishonest when it comes to values.)
Here's an explanation of the study:
>One other point that I find really interesting and important about Haidt’s work is his findings on the ability of different groups to empathize across these ideological divides. So in his book (p. 287) Haidt reports on the following experiment: after determining whether someone is liberal or conservative, he then has each person answer the standard battery of questions as if he were the opposite ideology. So, he would ask a liberal to answer the questions as if he were a “typical conservative” and vice-versa. What he finds is quite striking: “The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’ The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.” In other words, moderates and conservatives can understand the liberal worldview and liberals are unable to relate to the conservative worldview, especially when it comes to questions of care and fairness.
From: http://volokh.com/2014/01/17/jonathan-haidt-psychology-polit...