What is required to have a liberal imagination

The qualities of the liberal imagination are clear and distinct. First, the liberal subject (author or citizen) is capable of imagining other positions and values than his own. 

Not something I have experienced from liberals, they are usually accusatively finger jabbing from their Olympain moral heights

A crucial function of this imaginative faculty is the “negative capability” Trilling admired in Keats’s formulation of the ability to avoid settled ideas and recognize a certain ignorance or horizon to one’s own knowledge, in order to keep the mind open to new ideas and experiences.

Try telling a liberal they are wrong... good luck

The supposed virtue of the liberal knuckles straining as he hold on to sheer cliff face of mount virtue as proof that, like humanists of old, we are still somehow purer at heart than them.

I think it was E.M Forster, who said that good liberals must be liberal enough to be suspicious of being liberals.