A True-Believer in Liberalism

If we take what he says in the interview at face value, and not as duplicitous subversion. Liberalism enables the culture war and has no solution for it, unless being disposed by its principles to favor the SJW side over the illiberal side is a solution.

My thanks to @Peter_Wehner, who interviewed me for @TheAtlantic and did a better job of making sense of my work, and linking it to today, than I could have done myselfhttps://t.co/tNRDGYdgfH

— Jonathan Haidt (@JonHaidt) May 24, 2020

So what is Haidt hoping for? The political equivalent of Newton’s third law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Haidt put it this way: “Since we already see signs that most Americans are exhausted by this culture war, [my hope is] that this year or into next year will be kind of a pit of despair or a pit of darkness—and then we’ll emerge from it.”He continued, “I need to read up on how the religious wars ended in Europe, but my second- or thirdhand understanding is that it wasn’t that Europeans reached some profoundly enlightened view; they just got exhausted, and they realized, you know, we’ve got to stop this. And so that is actually my main source of hope, that things are so bad now and the fact that we can’t even confront a pandemic because of our polarization. We can’t share facts, we can’t share strategies, we can’t coordinate behavior because of our polarization. I think this will become increasingly clear.”

Haidt should read a bit more then, especially about the Peace of Westphalia, which was closer to a "live and let live" solution, with limited protection of the rights of Christian minorities. We're not going to get that with the blue-red conflict in the U.S., not without a hot war first.