Political identity — the set of values, affiliations, and loyalties through which one understands collective life — has become, in many contemporary democracies, the most reliable predictor of how people feel about those who hold different views. This is a relatively recent and dangerous development: the conflation of political position with personal worth, of policy disagreement with moral threat. Across cultures, the healthiest political traditions have been those that found ways to maintain both the integrity of one's commitments and the capacity for genuine encounter with those who do not share them.
Juana