One takeaway I got from this econtalk was not to confuse ideologues with partisans. Most people are partisans because upon closer analysis, they don't hold anything close to a competent ideology. Instead, they're engrossed in tribal warfare. They love to signal their allegiance to their tribe with belief badges. They not only fail at intellectual empathy with the other side, even trying is borderline treacherous to their side (why would you want to intellectually empathize with Socialists or Nazis?) Their worldview is a fantasy game of good vs. evil, not the logical working out a web of interrelated beliefs.
This is made even more clear by reflecting on what the red and blue tribe's beliefs even have to do with each other. Why should the pro-choice position be correlated with the high tax position? Smarter partisans will hold a few contrarian belief cards in their back pocket, just to prove they're not partisans. But logically unrelated beliefs should have absolutely no predictive power over one another. And yet if I know you think we need to build a wall on the Mexican boarder, that highly predicts that you also don't support more gun control. That's partisanship, not ideology.
