Speaking as someone who leans very slightly left in a deep red state (I would probably be considered a conservative anywhere else), this is nonsense. It may or may not have been true in the Reagan years, I'm too young to know, but Trump conservatives have absolutely no idea where liberals are coming from. Their perspectives on liberal views are just as skewed by stereotypes and propaganda as leftists' views of conservatives are.
who you are calling "Trump conservatives" is really a populist coalition of groups, very similar actually to the populist coalition that makes up the bulk of liberal voters. What marks "Trumpism" is precisely the appeal that Trump has to groups of working class people.
But what is usually meant by "conservatives" are intellectual conservatives, similar again to intellectual liberals who write for the NY Times and NPR. There's an old saying, "if you are not a [liberal/socialist] when you are young, you have no heart; if you are not a [conservative/capitalist] when you are older, you have no brain." Obviously, no leftist wants to agree they're all heart and no brain, but the saying exists nonetheless, from multiple observers; and perhaps in that adage is the same "common sense": if that's some sort of common progression, we can see that those conservatives might very well understand liberalism better than the liberals in that formulation would correspondingly understand conservatism.
If you're going to restrict "conservatives" to the intellectuals, then yes, I'll concede that intellectual conservatives as a rule understand liberals better than the average liberal does conservatives.
However, if you control for intellectualism, either by restricting both pools to intellectuals or expanding both pools to include everyone who identifies as left/right of center, that difference disappears. Neither wing understands the other very well at all, both sides as a rule choose to engage with strawmen versions of their opposition, and each side claims that its strawman is a more truthful model than the other's.
I'm not at all convinced that 'intellectual' liberals understand 'intellectual' conservatives, speaking as someone educated in the American higher education system.
My stance is pretty firmly that neither side understands the other at all, whether we're talking about intellectuals or otherwise.
I think the only predictor of understanding is the amount of exposure that someone has to actual human beings who hold the opposing view. Intellectual conservatives may have a slight advantage in this regard because college campuses tend to lean left, but I've interacted with plenty of college-educated conservatives who buy fully in to the stereotypes of liberals that are hawked on populist channels.
>My stance is pretty firmly that neither side understands the other at all
but you are ignoring the point I made, writing a comment a priori as if this thread doesn't already exist. I am reasonably conservative, and I understand leftists completely.
I was raised from the crib very left wing, full on commie, with socialist/social justice sensibilities. I was woke before you were born (yes, the word is that old). Then I studied classical econ, and watched the fearmongering about conservatives in the media ("Ronald Raygun is going to start a nuclear war!") never come true.
So, without changing any of my heartfelt sensibilites, I instead realized that the free market ("capitalism") actually delivers the things that working class people need: jobs and cheap goods; and that greedy rapacious capitalist employers have no interest in discriminating against anybody: if women truly earn 60 cents on the dollar for equal work, what capitalist wouldn't hire women to more cheaply make more money? but we don't see that happen, so what the left believes has to be wrong: either the capitalists are not driven by greed, or it's not equal work for less money.
so, no, many on the left who are just like I was do not understand the right, and plenty of us who have moved right from the left do understand perfectly well what noble goals that left sensibilities are trying to accomplish.
Well in my experience as someone who's been very conservative for my entire life, most Trump conservatives are ex-democrats who lean left, but find themselves alienated by a corporate / country-club democratic party, and so have joined the Republicans for some reason... I mean... kind of like Trump himself.
Yeah, that's not the case in the deep red states. The Republican party that's voting for Trump in my state this year is the same Republican party that threw the Tea Party because the Republicans weren't conservative enough. Same leadership, same constituents. And I'm not just talking general numbers, they're literally the same people.
Long-term Republicans are shocked not because their party suddenly and without warning became a populist vehicle but because the populist wave that fled the Democratic party during the civil rights era finally took over the party instead of just voting in their preferred old-school candidates.
