After our presentation today, I was reminded of a very influential video I watched by psychologist Jonathan Haidt which really helped me understand ‘the other side’:

If we are going to heal a divided society, we need to discover what the ‘other’ is thinking.  The ‘other’ for me was the… ‘conservative’ voter:

The deeper I looked into it, the more I realized that there were deep moral roots at play here that “liberals” and “conservatives” just didn’t get about each other.  When choices are made, there are basic foundations of values which one references.  Liberals and conservatives have different reference points.  Conservatives value, tradition and, well, conservation, whereas Liberals value fairness.  These structural values play out different in the moral calculus of decision making.  These ideas were all laid out in Haidt’s book “The Righteous Mind”, and after reading it, I’ve never been the same since: