Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Happiness Hypothesis, has a riveting explanation for the deepening and seemingly intractable partisan division in America's politics.  Turns out it has a lot more to do with the basics of human psychology than we'd care to admit. Humans are built for allegiance to a group - it's the unique human quality that has made advanced civilization possible. That spirit of group, team and tribe tends to be built around moral principles that become sacred objects, like the environment and civil rights for liberals or fiscal responsibility and families for conservatives.  A basic principle of moral psychology is that "morality binds and blinds." Each political party is a team forged by circling around its particular sacred values, which makes the party hypersensitive to threats to those values, but blind to evidence that contradicts their moral consensus. It means that a liberal is more sensitive to a civil rights threat, but has a less critical eye when assessing whether a particular law might be unwieldy or cause unintended consequence.   A conservative might be hard to convince that data suggests that the fiscal stimulus had an effect because they are so clearly locked in on the effect of that additional spending on the deficit, which liberals tend to too often shrug off.  The Asteroid Club acknowledges these qualities of human nature instead of trying to fight them.  It offers a truly unique - and hopefully entertaining - format to take turns explaining our understanding of the threats America faces and listening to others' perceptions of threat in our own blindspots, and finally joining against the common threats on the same team. I'll help you deflect your asteroid, if you help me deflect mine. Apparently - as our founders seemed to understand a long time ago - we need each other to successfully solve America's problems.