Too Naive?

The neo-neocon posts on the motives of the soft-left and center-left, and then concludes by wonder if she is too naive or giving too much benefit of the doubt. I say that she is not. The left regards the right as bad people because they don't try and get to know people on the right, or Republicans. If they did, they would continue to disagree with them, but they couldn't regard them as bad people. It is by knowing people on both sides that makes it easy to disagree in a honorable way that assumes that the other side has different ideas, but are essentally good people with different values, and hence advocate different policies. The other side can be way off on a few things, but mostly they are just applying a different set of first principles. On both the far right and the far left are those who can't do this and end up regarding even people on their own side as comprimised and unworthy, let alone people on the other side. Such extremists are almost always nuts.

Keeping in touch with people who know the other side, either because of personal experience, or because they sit on the other side, is valuable. Hating people who are bad is neccesary, hating good people because you mistakenly think they are bad is itself bad.