The left’s empathy deficit

A very good point made by Peter Hitchens in an interview with the Evening Standard yesterday. It was this:

‘A particular problem of the Left is that they believe their personal goodness is entangled with their opinions. Therefore, it is hard for them to have friendships with — or even like — conservative people. It’s not just that they disagree with them; it’s that they feel superior to them and they feel these people are morally bad. I enjoy the company of the people I disagree with, probably rather more than the people I agree with, but I don’t think people are bad because I disagree with them. I just think they’re wrong.’

This strikes me as indisputable – although I think Peter is referring less to the “left” than to the gibbering libtards of London. Though having said that there was a study a short while back which suggested that left wing people were far more likely than right wing people to “defriend” someone on Facebook because they disagreed with their views. I suppose Marx and Habermas and Gramsci and even Plekhanov, along with numerous other similar post-Marxist thugs, are somewhere at the heart of the answer, with their views as to objective reality and the personal being political and so on. Or is there a simpler reason?