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Notes -
Haidt is a leftist who opposes wokestupid insanity. He is about as conservative as Matthew Yglesias or Ezra Klein.
That's the definitional issue again - see the discussion we had of Lomborg.
I have heard the argument that at present the right includes you if you hold a single right-wing position, and the left excludes you if you deny a single left-wing position, and that's a standard that puts people like Haidt or Lomborg on the right. But that doesn't seem to hold up well in practice, and the right has gotten increasingly exclusive - people with conservative credentials as impeccable as David French or Jonah Goldberg are cast out, for instance, while people as obviously and deeply liberal as, say, Bari Weiss get accepted. The tribes are not ideologically consistent and often seem to just operate directionally, to me. French started conservative and is drifting, if slowly, in a leftwards direction; Weiss started liberal and is drifting, if slowly, in a rightwards direction. Even though from an objective point of view French is still way more right-wing than Weiss, the only thing people care about is the direction of travel.
Haidt was, in my sense, a fairly straight-down-the-line liberal up until his work in moral psychology, leading up to Moral Foundations Theory and The Righteous Mind, caused him to develop more appreciation for tradition and custom. I read Haidt as then moving into a centrist space overall, but avoiding being pigeonholed in any one category. Since then, unfortunately, Haidt has gotten much more focused on a kind of activism, this time around social media, mental health, and parenting, and on his pet issue he's... probably slightly on the right? The whole 'free range kids' agenda doesn't neatly map on to left or right, but if you put a gun to my head I'd say it's a bit closer to the right.
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