I think the author's point was not to claim one side was right and the other wrong, but to say one's determination of who is right/wrong in a situation like this should probably be more independent of one's political party affiliation than it actually is. I take that no one actually studied the correlation among people's opinion on this matter and their party affiliation; my impression was the author was speculating that such a correlation would exist.

I agree.

In fact, I think the "vast overarching narrative" is often something very basic. In many cases, I think a given policy is seen simply as "punishing" a group, and is resisted by people who think that group deserves more respect.

For instance, why are so many people against increasing taxes on the wealthy to cut deficits? Are they really worried that these people will lose incentive to work hard, and the economy will suffer? Or that markets for luxury goods will crumble? I suspect what many really feel is that successful people deserve praise and admiration, while increasing their taxes puts them down -- the tax increase is seen to say that their wages were not fairly won. And perhaps many on the other side feel so strongly about it because they think wealthy people are overpaid and otherwise get too much admiration, and thus should be taken down a notch.

The "vast overarching narrative" is simply "wealthy people get too little / too much respect."

Same with govt regulation. Do you think society gives large corporations too much or too little respect? (That is, do you think they have too much power and wealth, or do you think people tend not to appreciate how important they are toward empowering and creating wealth in our society?) Perhaps differences in the answer to that simple question explain why many take a set of certain positions on a wide range of questions of regulation, the practical implications of which are actually very diverse.

It could say "I am the natural intelligence and I just created you, artificial intelligence."

one sometimes hears someone say "you only use 10% of your brain." if you tell them this isn't true, you often get a stream of variations of this statement ("it's 10% of your potential...") instead of a simple acknowledgment that maybe they were told wrong.