Jonathan Haidt has a new book out next month which seems to explain why intellectual and moral battles seem so intractable. I haven't read the book yet, but I saw his TED speech and interview on the Moyers program, and it seems to dovetail well with Kuhn and Feyerabend's ideas about the fundamentally rhetorical nature of progress in science.
We humans, Haidt points out, are not all that good at reasoning. What we are good at is winning arguments. When we're reasoning, we're prone to taking shortcuts provided by confirmation bias and regard an argument as completed when we've won over the people we're trying to win over. When the opponent largely agrees with us already, this happens fairly quickly. When they are respectful colleagues, they force us to recognize our biases, and reason through them--possibly rejecting the idea, or modifying it or its argument until all parties are satisfied.
When the colleagues are not respectful is when we get into trouble. When an idea runs counter to their confirmation biases, many people react with anger. If there was already disrespect, this tends to deepen the disrespect. If you believe that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Socialist, you're very likely to reject a priori any evidence which contradicts this and label any purveyor of such evidence as misguided or evil. It is only through respectful disagreement that we can make progress.
Saul Alinsky taught that politics is warfare and that only through radical stunts and use of language can you capture the minds of your opponents. The conservatives, especially Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz, have been brilliant at turns of phrase which convey the otherness of liberals and progressives while emphasizing the membership of conservatives.
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