We've advanced beyond those days, of course:
The ongoing trial involving journalist Mark Steyn – accused of defaming climate change theorist Michael Mann – reflects an increasingly dangerous tendency among our intellectual classes to embrace homogeneity of viewpoint. Steyn, whose column has appeared for years on these pages, may be alternatingly entertaining or over-the-top obnoxious, but the slander lawsuit against him marks a milestone in what has become a dangerously authoritarian worldview being adopted in academia, the media and large sections of the government bureaucracy.
Let’s call it “the debate is over” syndrome, referring to a term used most often in relationship with climate change but also by President Barack Obama last week in reference to what remains his contentious, and theoretically reformable, health care plan. Ironically, this shift to certainty now comes increasingly from what passes for the Left in America.
Yes. I've often complained that it is a horrible assault on our language that "liberal minded" is portrayed as a synonym for "open minded." They are in fact, different.
I'm not arguing that conservatives are uniquely open minded. Nor am I denying liberals can be open minded, of course--but the sets merely overlap a bit rather than being identical.
The urge to just tell opponents to shut up and get with the program has nothing to do with open mindedness.
UPDATE: Related.
UPDATE: More related thoughts on the issue of only looking at information that supports your view (confirmation bias), that too many liberals assume is only a conservative problem:
Mr. Klein couldn’t muster much of an effort to find examples of liberal confirmation bias.
At least he concedes it exists. Even that much of a concession New York Times columnist Paul Krugman cannot abide. He insists conservatives are more prone to confirmation bias because he and all the liberals he knows are so much more open-minded than conservatives. ...
Such arrogant groupthink not only leads to bad policies, but it also reinforces a mass psychology that simply takes it for granted that liberals have sole access to the Truth. It’s like having God on your side without having to believe in God.
To bring this back to at least spitting distance of my usual topics, confirmation bias is how you really gain the element of surprise in war. As I've noted now and again, you often can't hide what you are doing.
But you can put out information that leads your target to draw the wrong conclusions about what they see by making a narrative that explains what is seen according to the target's existing (and incorrect) views.
To think that one part of the political spectrum is immune to that weakness is idiocy. Which would explain Krugman.
