I would take this a couple steps further and argue that a key reason libs reliably fail to model the theory of mind of those they disagree with is the hegemonic institutional power they enjoyed for almost a century, starting with what Walter Lippmann described in Public Opinion in 1922 all the way through ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’ Obama-ism.
From the seat of elite institutional power (the media, academia, government, the arts) libs looked out unidirectionally and had great power to regiment public opinion with supervisory and regulatory discretion over the manufacture of ideas and ideology, particularly in the postwar period where certain ‘explanations’ became sacrosanct in service of narrativizing the teleology of Progress.
People make fun of libs for eliding ‘explanations’ and ‘justifications’ but… that’s just something you’re going to do if you have power: You will select ‘explanations’ that are at minimum ideologically compatible and prohibit those that are not. Libs worked within the framework of this institutional advantage for so long that they just took for granted their discretionary power to decide what ideas should even be considered and along these lines rejected the notion that an accurate account of ‘theory of mind’ should be freely granted unless there was some advantage in it. (Why cede that power?)
This institutional advantage started to break down seriously about a decade ago and libs realized they were losing a stranglehold on narrative-making and ideological production. A key reason there was so much hysteria over ‘platforming’ was an awareness institutional capacity to manufacture and direct consensus was breaking down.
So a big part of the issue here is that libs haven’t updated their software to account for the new circumstances on the ground. They still think it’s their job to provide ‘regulatory approval’ of different ideas and ideological factions and not only do they not have any interest in understanding those they disagree with, they are working off the idea that just by providing an accurate account of those they disagree with they are unnecessarily ceding power and authority.
This is ridiculous of course. That ship has long sailed and many elite institutions are running on fumes. But many libs will be loathe to give up the pretense of their authority absent some cataclysmic crack up, and what that would entail given their still holding fast to delusions of grandeur after more than a decade of Trump stomping through and turning things over, I do not know.
It is not just that liberals don’t know what conservatives think. Not knowing what other people think would be like, you think they support immigration, but it turns out they’re against immigration. Liberals know that conservatives are against immigration. They’re not confused or uneducated about *what* conservatives think.
What they lack is a model of how and why conservatives think as they do. What most of them cannot do is take the other side of the argument in a debate. When they model conservatives it basically reduces to, “well, I guess I’m just a big dumb idiot racist.” If you point this out, they do long threads about how you’re desperate for their approval, which is just another demonstration of the same phenomenon.
The term that people use for this kind of understanding is, “theory of mind.” It’s not my term. I didn’t invent it. We could use some other term. But you need *some* term for this to distinguish it from merely not understanding what other people think.
I don’t really see the utility of finding some other term. This term captures it pretty well. People know what it means. It seems to be working just fine.