David Brooks , who often writes in the New York Times (see here for recent pieces by him) is one of the people I follow. He is one of the reasonable voices in the moderate conservative group, and as much a sociologist as a political commentator. Peter Berkowitz has just written a piece about him entitled David Brooks Reproaches Elites, Recycles Cliches About the People. He has an interesting perspective.
The first thing about his argument that that I had never really thought about was his claim that conservatives understand progressives much better than progressives understand conservatives. The reason is obvious (now that it has been pointed out!), the liberal progressive worldview dominates the news, academia, public schools, the movies, etc. So, like it or not, conservatives are bathed daily in the progressive world view, while progressives have to go looking for the conservative worldview, and few bother. Instead most just accept the common (liberal) stereotypes, constantly aired in the progressive worldview, that conservatives must surely be uneducated knuckle-draggers, because otherwise they would obviously accept the progressive worldview.
I suppose that the naive belief that the American progressive worldview is so obviously better than any other worldview is part of what may have blinded our supposedly well-educated elites in Washington to why traditional religious cultures in the Middle East aren't so eager to be "Americanized".
His other critiques of Brooks seem to me fair. But in David's defense, it is always very difficult to look outside of our own cultural "bubble", so I'm inclined to credit David Brooks for trying, rather than condemn him for failing to succeed completely.
In any case, this is an interesting argument, worth pondering..
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