Intertextual observation of the day

After I read Polansky’s eloquent post on foreign policy—and I quote:

The willingness to take another state’s interests seriously is a strong hedge against moralism in our own foreign policy — after all, if they have no valid interests or security concerns, then they’re simply evil. The ur- realist Hans Morgenthau made this idea a key platform in his theory. No less a conservative than Edmund Burke remarked that

“Nothing is so fatal to a nation as an extreme of self-partiality, and the total want of consideration of what others will naturally hope or fear.”

If we recognized that other nations had fears and honors and interests no less significant to them than ours are to ourselves, and embedded this idea in our foreign policy without sacrificing our own interests, I suspect it would have a useful moderating effect on our approach.

—I perused the warfare in the comments thread on Sonny’s post on the Prop 8 Wars, found here.

Having done all that, it suddenly occurred to me that Polansky’s wise counsel (with all due credit to Burke) might—just might—apply to the partisan political arena as well.