There is an asymmetry in the political dichotomy that that most leftists, like Mooney, will never understand. It is the fact that many, maybe even most, Republicans (Mooney’s america-speak for conservatives) were born as, and inculcated in youth as, and grew-up as leftists. This majority of the presently conservative believers, drifted from leftist utilitarianism to conservationism as they learned lessons from the real life. What Mooney can’t see is that most of the people that he despises once had the same utopian, authoritarian ideas as he presently has, but they repudiated those ideas as they matured. That these conservatives do not accept Mooney’s ideas is not that they’re too ignorant to understand Mooney’s arguments; it is that they understand much too well the bad consequence that result from the well intentioned totalitarianism that Mooney argues for.
This is an intellectual asymmetry; it is much harder for a leftest to comprehend an argument for idea he never believed in than it is for a rightest to comprehend an argument for an idea he once believed in but rejected after experience.