Republican Like Me belongs to a certain phenotype, which we can call the “anti-jeremiad.”  Whether on the Left or the Right, people of good will sometimes write a book after discovering what they did not earlier know about their political opponents.  They make those discoveries by exposing themselves to opposing thoughts and attempting to understand the people who hold them.  Thus enlightened, they attempt to find common ground, lamenting the polarization of today’s American society.  Probably because the educated Right necessarily is necessarily continuously exposed to the thought of the educated Left, and not vice versa, such anti-jeremiads can mostly be found by authors from the Left.  A classic of the genre is Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, which largely parallels Ken Stern’s book, although Hochschild offers more focus on the personal likeability of her political opponents, and Stern’s voyage of discovery offers more focus on the plausibility of their arguments.  There is always room for another, though, and this genre has rarely been as well done or as timely as in this …