It’s been a little over 11 years since I coined the term “we-ist” – the notion that everyone in the world is more comfortable around, more forgiving of people more like themselves, and less so around those less like them.  In extreme cases that turns to intolerance, bigotry and hatred.

And it covers everyone in the world; just as the white redneck might be less tolerant of the black teenager, so might the middle-class black woman look down her nose at the blue-collar Mexican latino, who is at least thankful that he’s more creole than the native-looking Latino, who disdains the Korean grocer, who has no time for the Japanese-American customer, who is thankful she’s not Chinese, who think Anglos in general are annoying…

And it’s not just race; liberals are every bit as intolerant as conservatives are:

Research over the years has shown that in industrialized nations, social conservatives and religious fundamentalists possess psychological traits, such as the valuing of conformity and the desire for certainty, that tend to predispose people toward prejudice. Meanwhile, liberals and the nonreligious tend to be more open to new experiences, a trait associated with lower prejudice. So one might expect that, whatever each group’s own ideology, conservatives and Christians should be inherently more discriminatory on the whole.

But more recent psychological research, some of it presented in January at the annual meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), shows that it’s not so simple. These findings confirm that conservatives, liberals, the religious and the nonreligious are each prejudiced against those with opposing views. But surprisingly, each group is about equally prejudiced. While liberals might like to think of themselves as more open-minded, they are no more tolerant of people unlike them than their conservative counterparts are.

Surprisingly?

Not if you’re a conservative in a liberal town, it’s not.