We're Not So Alike, You And Me

When I first started reading political blogs, back around 2001-02, I made an honest effort to read as many conservative (or at least libertarian) blogs as I did liberal ones. I never read Instapundit because I really truly didn't get what all the fucking fuss was about, but otherwise I kept reading for several years on a number of reasonably well known blogs. And eventually I stopped and gave up, for a complex of reasons, but I find the essential core of the problem well articulated by a commenter at Crooked Timber:

The thing I didn’t appreciate until the Internet is exactly how weird conservatives were. I thought about conservatives the way most liberals think about anyone different from them. I tried to imagine, “What would make me think that?” or “What would make me act that way?” Reading conservatives on the Internet has taught me that conservatives cannot be understood that way. You’re better off using the same part of your brain that you use to understand a cobra.

Now, I'll be nice and say that the operative phrase there isn't "conservatives" but "conservatives on the Internet," but the point holds. I wonder how often an attempt at honest understanding and rapproachment ends in fortified partisanship.