George Packer writes:

The language and posture of the opposition to Perriello, health care, Obama, and everything his Administration does have closed off any breathing room for reason, facts, or compromise.

This is an interesting observation. In a very interesting reported post, Packer offers up a number of observations that would strike many libertarians and conservatives as odd.

Verga’s biography reads, oddly enough, like that of a liberal do-gooder: an undergraduate degree from Berkeley, a master’s in psychology as well as a stint in the writing program at Antioch University*, and volunteer work with the children of poor immigrants in San Francisco’s Mission district. But Verga is as hard-line a libertarian conservative as you’ll find.

My experience might be profoundly atypical, but a not inconsiderable number of the people I know who do volunteer work with poor immigrants and other people in need are politically right-of-center, many of them devoutly religious. When I’m lucky enough to travel in the developing world, I often encounter American families either heading to or heading back from development-oriented mission work. The people I know who work as salaried professionals in agencies and non-profits providing social services, in contrast, skew very differently in political-ideological terms: they are overwhelmingly left-of-center. One wonders about the extent to which we allow familiar narratives to color our perception of facts and conversations, etc. I know this happens to me all the time. This is why I feel very fortunate that most of the people I’m close to don’t share my views on political matters.

On Friday night, I had a long conversation with an Ohio native while en route to Columbus for a television program. We’ll call him Rob. After talking to him about the various jobs he’s worked, we turned to politics. Rob, in turns out, was a conservative Republican, who believed that George W. Bush would eventually be remembered as fondly as Harry S Truman. And it’s certainly true that Scott was angry about the state of the country and the prospect of higher taxes and what he saw as an increasingly pervasive ethic of getting something for nothing. I have to say, though, I didn’t see him as an anthropological specimen strangely divorced from reality, not least because he seemed to have a very sophisticated command of the relevant issues, down to potential flaws in the CBO’s analysis of ACA.

Rob was a car salesman who is now working as a driver, and he’s making considerably less than he did post-downturn. But he seemed strongly disinclined to think of this as a profound personal tragedy. Rather, he seemed to see it as a natural part of the business cycle, and he accepted the possibility that it might take him a long time to get back to his old income. He wasn’t blaming the president or congressional Democrats for his problems. Rather, he was concerned about what he saw as a pervasive climate of dishonesty regarding the fiscal trade-offs we’re making as a country.

I have conversations like this a lot. Though I’m certainly not a reporter, I make a habit of talking to as many people as I can over the course of a day, particularly when I’m traveling. One reason why I’d make a terrible reporter is that I’m very wary of divining bite-size insights from these conversations. Rob, for example, comes across as a rock-ribbed conservative. But he also has an unpredictable mix of views on foreign policy, John Lennon, and much else. There’s always a danger in doing violence to the particularity of the people you meet, and I’m particularly sensitive to it. I’ve known many people from affluent families scarred by mental illness and drug addiction, I’ve known lots of wise and happy people who’ve traded income for happiness, and I wince at the idea that the Gini map of the world is the only useful map of the world.

Creating a narrative is about using some pieces of a story and discarding others. Some writers and journalists use this to complicate existing narratives. Others use this sculptural process — of chipping away at the marble of real-life experiences — to reinforce existing narratives, often without realizing it. Among my relatives, there are many who strongly oppose ACA on the grounds that it’s not a transparent single-payer system, and they resent seeing their arguments dismissed by the folks in charge.

In Texas, I met a couple of self-described libertarians who wanted to nationalize oil and gas resources to help finance the welfare state. (This was an idea advanced by Scoop Jackson and other mainstream Democrats in the mid-1970s, incidentally.) And you know what? I disagreed with them about the viability of the plan, but they didn’t strike me as sputtering-with-rage lunatics. Indeed, the idea seemed not that much kookier than the prospect of paying for massive increases in federal expenditures solely with taxes on households earning over $250,000. Ken Cuccinelli, another person I disagree with fairly often, doesn’t strike me as irrationally angry either.

Some level of anger and frustration strikes me as a natural reaction to an intellectually stultified status quo. We point to polling data that demonstrates the profound ignorance of our political opponents. We don’t, however, point to polling data that demonstrates the profound ignorance of our political allies. My favorite example: it seems that some Tea Partiers believe that taxes have increased over the last year, whereas taxes have in fact decreased. Could it be that Tea Partiers understand that massive spending increases, including new tax expenditures, necessarily mean higher taxes in the future, even if we take into account dynamic scoring?

There is a fundamental asymmetry between one side that promises to do more without acknowledging that it will thus have to take more, and another side that is keenly aware of the take more part and thus resists the do more part. How could people in the latter camp not come across as moral monsters to those who believe that doing more will solve all problems?

Conor Friedersdorf touched on this dilemma back in 2008, and his argument still resonates.