Jonah Goldberg has an excellent column in today's National Review Online, They Blinded Me with Science, about a recent survey done at Berkeley to psychoanalyze conservatives. Recently some bloggers took Ann Coulter to task for lumping liberals, now social scientists at Berkeley are doing the same thing to conservatives.
Jonah's premise is that the whole study is worthless because liberals aren't subject to the same microscope, and he provides several examples of liberals fitting in the same mode, such as fear and aggression when it comes to bio-engineered food for instance. Let's see what I can add from my own experience.
The claim is made by leftists that conservatives are mean, judgmental people. I once saw an issue of The Nation showing John Ashcroft as a Mafia figure. Another issue from about that time showed Lynn Cheney as a vampire with blood dripping from her fangs. Hmmm, liberals are real nice, huh? I could also bring up rhetoric by Michael Moore and Paul Begala for instance. In fact, speaking of Paul Begala, but does anyone remember Begala's famous statement about Red vs. Blue America? Pure bile, blaming the Bush victory on people who commit hate crimes, conveniently leaving out similar crimes committed in Blue-state America, such as the brutal murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner by Mumia Abu-Jamal, the murder of Betty Van Patter in Oakland by the Black Panthers, and the death of a Jewish retail-store owner in New York City when his store was torched after a speech by Al Sharpton. So, liberals nice, conservatives mean? Not so clear cut to me. I think individual differences are a lot more varied than what a blanket generalization based on someone's ideology would give you.