The WSJ on Jonathan Haidt

Holman Jenkins has a great article on Jonathan Haidt - not mostly about the book, but an interview about his ideas, especially those on liberals vs conservatives.

........As we sit in his new office at New York University, he professes an immodest aim: He wants liberals and conservatives to listen to each other more, hate each other less, and to understand that their differences are largely rooted in psychology, not open-minded consideration of the facts. "My big issue, the one I'm somewhat evangelical about, is civil disagreement," he says...

In India, where he performed field studies early in his professional career, he encountered a society in some ways patriarchal, sexist and illiberal. Yet it worked and the people were lovely. In Brazil, he paid attention to the experiences of street children and discovered the "most dangerous person in the world is mom's boyfriend. When women have a succession of men coming through, their daughters will get raped," he says. "The right is right to be sounding the alarm about the decline of marriage, and the left is wrong to say, 'Oh, any kind of family is OK.' It's not OK."...

"I spoke to some Democrats about things in the book and they asked, how can we weaponize this? My message to them was: You're not ready. You don't know what you stand for yet. You don't have a clear moral vision." ...

Mr. Haidt also considers today's Republican Party a curse upon the land, even as he admires conservative ideas. He says its defense of lower taxes on capital income—mostly reported by the rich—is indefensible. He dismisses Mitt Romney as a "moral menial," a politician so cynical about the necessary cynicism of politics that he doesn't bother to hide his cynicism. ...

There is more, almost all worth reading.