Not sure why you are getting downvotes. For anyone curious, Haidt is a liberal professor who is dedicated to figuring out how to get people talking across political ideologies. The book that covers this topic is called The Righteous Mind and is an excellent read or listen.

I try not to be aggressive when I engage in these conversations and instead focus on positive solutions based on finding out why they believe what they believe, instead of contrarian “in your face” sort of takes. They aren’t effective in my experience.

Read “the righteous mind” by Jonathan Haidt. Great audiobook too.

Those were foundational for me as well. Along the same lines of "Outgroup", Johnathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" gave a lot of insight in to why people hold certain values and beliefs.

This article is a little light. If you're actually interested in scholarship around the topic, Jonathan Haidt has a lot of great writing around how deep seated "gut" feelings like disgust drive our moral judgements. I would highly recommend his books and papers.

The Righteous Mind is a good starting place for this topic.

Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind”, any of Dan Ariely’s work.

And having elected Trump, what did they get aside from triggering the libs?

I see a fair bit of attempts at understanding. Liberals love to write books like "The Righteous Mind" and "What's The Matter With Kansas?", attempting to understand conservatives from a liberal point of view. I can't think of anything comparable on the right. Progressives seem to me desperate to understand and cater to conservatives, and it feels like the only thing conservatives want is to make my life harder.

It could very well be that I'm just not listening hard enough. That seems to be the response every time liberals lose elections: "understand harder", because the problem is with me. But I'm starting to think that maybe I do understand: they don't want anything from me except someone to be angry at, and whatever despair they're undergoing is more about the deliberate induction of that despair than anything I actually do.

> The intellectual left loves to pump out articles and books trying to explain right-wing thought: ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind

> 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.

One of the big theories in The Righteous Mind can be used to explain this. The Moral Foundations Theory lists 5 drivers of moral judgments, 5 reasons why people may feel things are 'right'. Then it gives data showing that liberals feel 2 of these strongly and 3 weakly, while conservatives feel all 5 about as equally strongly.

By that theory, the reason that conservatives need not work as hard to understand liberals is that they feel all the same moral impulses liberals do, and more, while liberals only feel 2/5ths of the conservatives' impulses.

The same theory suggests that conservative persuasion will be more effective on liberals than liberal persuasion on conservatives. This then leads to election losses, which leads to hand wringing about how liberals don't understand conservatives, so they can't convince them to vote liberal.

That's not at all what I got out of reading "The Righteous Mind", so not sure how to respond to this constructively. Did you read the book? Granted it's been ~ 1 year since I read it, but I walked away with a completely different impression. The interesting thing that was covered was that liberals and conservatives have different ways to approach moral reasoning.

Republicans tend (this is not universal) to view things through a lense of six things: faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order. Democrats focus on care and fighting oppression. Again, this is a simplification, but the theme is that conservatives have different moral foundations that make it hard for liberals to understand why they make decisions they do. A solid example (I can't remember if this was used in the book, but it helps me) is "why are they voting against their own interests". I hear this in my personal life all the time! I used to say it! Then I realized that voting for someone who is against welfare, when you are low on the socioeconomic spectrum, makes sense if you overweight faith, and believe that abortion is a grave moral sin. What's some poverty now compared to eternal damnation? I don't believe in hell myself, but this insight let me understand that someone who views things different than me isn't dumb, they just have different values that allow them to rationally decide things that my values seem irrational.

The hard part is trying to talk across this gap in moral reasoning, and find the right balance.