Know Thy Enemy, Know Thyself

      How well do you know the political other side?  How well do you know your own side?  How well do the other guys know you?

      There's a clip bouncing around news sites and social media, in which an arch-conservative U. S. Senator and a hyper-woke college professor clash; a web search pulls up dozens of examples, with headlines variously claiming victory for either of them.  I've seen the video.  Nobody wins; it's a smug, smart-alec frat boy and a smug, condescending law professor, neither one looking for common ground and, unsurprisingly, not finding any.  Plenty of red meat for the base, though, so perhaps they both won.  Give 'em seats next to Pyrrhus; they'll have much to talk about.

      The thing is, those people aren't us -- not the Senator, not the professor, not even the Greek king.  Your friends and neighbors are more like you than any one of those three, even if they don't vote for the same people you do.  No, really: we regular citizens have a lot more in common with one another than not, and increasingly, we don't get to see it.

      How accurate are your perceptions?  There's a quiz, plus an article with plenty of survey results, in words, charts and graphs.  The tl;dr (but you should) is that we're a lot alike -- and we're being chivvied by an extreme fifteen percent at the political fringes.  Maybe we shouldn't ought to do that.