Robert Jacoby’s Reviews > The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion > Status Update

Haidt, a liberal, inadvertently tells the truth about Democrats when he asks: "Why do rural and working-class Americans generally vote Republican when it is the Democratic Party that wants to redistribute money more evenly?" Um...because they're not communists?

"Murder often seems virtuous to revolutionaries." Was he writing about Antifa?

Good read so far. But he has his moments of research laxity, either from ignorance or deliberate omission. For example, "The Koran, for example, is full of warnings about the duplicity of out-group members, particularly Jews, yet the Koran does not command Muslims to kill Jews." This is a silly statement, and I think Haidt knows it. Just google "Antisemitism in Islam."

This type of mindless lack of self-awareness is even worse nowadays: "The Republican Party was (as we saw it) the party of war, big business, racism and evangelical Christianity. I could not understand how any thinking person would voluntarily embrace the party of evil, and so I and my fellow liberals looked for psychological explanations of conservatism, but not liberalism."

It took Haidt to page 126 to acknowledge his liberal viewpoints (and moral superiority). He grew up Jewish in the suburbs of NYC. "Being liberal was cool; being liberal was righteous." It's commonplace. "Liberalism seemed so obviously ethical." That's the problem right there.