>I cannot point to any coherent, constructive thought, mostly feelings of entitlement and an unwillingness to put myself in the other’s shoes.
You point this out as if it is some moral failing on the right. In fact, this is a personal failing. It should be simple enough to recognize that for any ideology that is large enough there almost certainly exists coherent and constructive thoughts within it. If you have yet to discover them, this is not because they do not exist, it is because you're not actually looking for them. I think this is done by people on both the left and the right all the time. They fail to deeply investigate the ideas of the other side, and then criticize the other side for having no good ideas.
> You point this out as if it is some moral failing on the right.
It’s not a comment on conservative politics as a whole, it’s a reflection on my own past immaturity, and how I recognize it in others when I see it. And I’ve had 4 years to observe Trump’s tweets, Breitbart, alt-right, Qanon, Proud Boys, so if you want to convince me that there’s constructive, long-term thinking behind any of that, you’ll have to be a little more specific than “look harder”.
case in point are the left and right's rhetoric on abortion, which each intentionally bypass the other side's argument. i.e. pro-life rhetoric does not acknowledge that women are inherently stakeholders, while pro-choice: woman's right to choose doesn't address whether the fetus has rights (or choice). It is difficult to make progress when rhetoric pretends that the other side does not have reasoned arguments, but is instead based on toxic masculinity/sexism/paternalism while the other side pretends that those who get abortions are just loose immoral women.
I see no end of this, and that is why I choose to think about actually constructive policies: e.g. free, prevalent, effective birth control for both men and women.
You point this out as if it is some moral failing on the right. In fact, this is a personal failing. It should be simple enough to recognize that for any ideology that is large enough there almost certainly exists coherent and constructive thoughts within it. If you have yet to discover them, this is not because they do not exist, it is because you're not actually looking for them. I think this is done by people on both the left and the right all the time. They fail to deeply investigate the ideas of the other side, and then criticize the other side for having no good ideas.